John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following his rather unwise decisions during the course of the second movie, everyone’s favourite dog-loving assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is on the run, hunted by the rest of the series’ weirdo assassin underworld, and excommunicated from all useful services of their underground world. He’ll have to call in old favours and murder an astonishing amount of mooks and mid-level bosses to perhaps get a chance at survival.

My first time watching Parabellum (which, adorably, will turn out to be a Latin/ammunition-based pun), I really loathed the film (and I’m not going to link to that short piece, because Now-Me is obviously right, until I’m going to change my mind again in the future). Clearly, that's not the case anymore. In fact, I’ve come around to really rather loving it.

I still believe it is not an ideal choice to finish an action film with epic ambitions like this on several fights between Keanu and actors who are simply much better screen fighters than he is - the man certainly has the right spirit, but even in his Matrix days, he has always been a bit stiff and awkward when tasked with unarmed fights, which does tend to look worse when he’s set against more naturally limber opponents like Mark Dacascos or Yayan Ruhian. But then, he does throw himself into the fights with full conviction.

Otherwise, today’s me finds it difficult to argue with Parabellum’s digital neon aesthetics, its commitment to absurd body counts achieved via complicated choreography, or its increasingly pulp baroque world building that’s at once absurd and wonderous.

Even the circular there and back again of the plot that irritated me the first time around makes thematic sense on my second go at the film. It is emblematic of how our dubious hero is trapped in an endless cycle of awesome/pointless violence and rules that only serve the rulers, with the added irony that it is exactly his historical adherence to these rules that lets others in his subculture cut Wick rather a lot of slack.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Or really, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, for even though Coppola at the time insisted on pretending this to be a close adaptation of the Stoker’s novel, this runs as roughshod over the original as is the norm for movie Draculas. This isn’t a bad thing, I believe – I, for one, don’t need a one to one adaptation of a Victorian novel, as much as I like that particular example of its form. This one is about as close to the original as Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce. Where Hooper chose to retell Dracula as a Quatermass movie, Coppola’s Dracula is the Dario Argento version of Dracula that Argento’s actual Dracula isn’t.

The main project of Coppola’s version appears to be a bit of projection: of the director’s own middle-aged horniness on the novel, overplaying the sexual subtext of a novel that does indeed have rather a lot of sexual subtext so intensely, one repeatedly wants to recommend cold showers to the filmmaker as much as to his characters. Some study of the dictionary entries for “sledgehammer” and “subtlety” might have been of use, as well. All of this has something of the air of watching a high budget Jess Franco movie without the crotch shot obsession but it with even more sexy (and “sexy”) writhing.

That’s not a bad thing in my book, mind you, but rather is an inherent part of what has turned this initially often maligned film into a bit of a classic: sex – eroticism tends to be subtler – is absolutely and always at the core of Dracula’s aesthetics, created out of thin air and celluloid, through the operatically overblown and utterly beautiful production design, the incredible number of bad accents by hot actors who should have known better (as well as Keanu Reeves), and Coppola’s insane/awesome decision to only use effects and filmmaking tricks reproducible on set and in camera (actual theatrical magic).

Thus, Coppola manages to create a mood of highly artificial, overheated and oversexed beauty that never lets up for a single shot – the film’s aesthetics are its actual point, its mood irreproducible and uncreatable by any other means. This may very well be the best possible example of the cinema of style as substance not made by an Italian.

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

Warning: contains dolphin-related spoilers!

This write-up is based on the clearly superior Japanese cut of the movie. Why is it superior? Because it features more of Takeshi Kitano and Dolph Lundgren and its third act vaguely makes sense, if you squint.

The close cyberpunk future of 1995+whatever. Okay, it’s 2021, but really and of course, it’s 1995’s 2021. Johnny (Keanu Reeves) works as a data courier, which is to say, he has replaced the part of his long term memory used for his childhood memories with sensational 80GB of data so he can literally carry data around in his head. He’s even upgrading to humungous 160GB right at the start of the movie, so take that, SanDisk!

Alas, the super secret and extra dangerous data his middle-man Ralfi (Udo Kier) has lined up for him that is supposed to pay for getting Johnny's childhood memories back, is much larger than that, which leads to dangerous side effects the longer the data is in Johnny’s head. In two days or so, his head will – figuratively or actually, we don’t know – explode.

That’s not even the biggest of Johnny’s problems. The data is hardly in his head when a team of Yakuza doing the dirty work for an evil pharma corporation ambush him and his clients. Johnny barely manages to escape – he’s luckier there than his clients are – but only has one third of the codes needed to encrypt the data – the only way to get it out of his head.

Hunted by the Yakuza, – we regularly pop in with their boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) who is going through the early stages of grief for the loss of his child – and the corp, and betrayed by Ralfi, our hero’s quest for getting rid of the data is supported by street samurai/bodyguard Jane (Dina Meyer) and the anti-corporate resistance whose leader isn’t actually Ice-T like we might at first think but a damn dolphin. Also involved are a crazy, evil, cybernetic street preacher (Dolph Lundgren dressed up as post-apocalyptic Moses), and barely coherent, yet awesome, monologues during which Johnny wrestles with his conscience as well as the importance of room service.

Some movies don’t age gracefully; others, like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic get better – well, immensely more entertaining – once they’ve got a couple of decades behind them. Today, it is easy to enjoy this as an intensely 90s movie, whereas during the 90s, it was exactly its extreme 90s-ness that made it practically unwatchable.

Today, when we have reached a state of practical corporate ownership (he said, using a Google site to post this on) that just doesn’t look as sexy and absurd as the one portrayed in the movie, the film’s bad future seems incredibly attractive. It is, after all full of hot people dressed up like extras from an Italian post-apocalyptic movie, contains a cyberspace that looks like a digital psychedelic light show instead of being the place where crazy people shout at each other for all eternity, and has 160GB of RAM in its head (and very little else).

I respect the hell out of Johnny Mnemonic as a bizarre high-ish budget cyberpunk as pulp movie as well: the brazen absurdity of its awesome, nonsensical production design, the straight-up nuttiness and glorious dumbness of its action set pieces, William Gibson’s deep if you’ve imbibed enough, otherwise nonsensical  philosophical monologues poor Reeves has to get through, the willingness to go with silly, “cool” ideas instead of aiming for boring depth – it’s all good in a “how did they manage to get a budget for this” way, and great as popular cinema no populace in its right mind actually watches gets.

To really draw in an audience of me, the film features a wish list of cult movie favourites in roles large and small: Keanu is at that point in his career when he has learned enough basic acting skills to get through scenes without falling over his own feet and shows the awesome ability to keep a straight face even when he shares a scene with Moses Lundgren and a dolphin, or when Henry Rollins rants into his face. He’s also young enough to be agile and fast in action sequences without too much help from the editing room. I very much suspect his back hurts less, as well. Then we get Kitano (who has something of a plausible character arc in the Japanese cut) being Kitano, Kier as ready for anything as he ever was, Dolph looking as if he really enjoys himself, Ice-T doing his usual shtick for non-cop roles, Meyer aiming for intense and dangerous but often only hitting cute, Barbara Sukowa as an AI (don’t ask)… It’s pretty fantastic.

In other words, this one really is in dire need of a reassessment from the larger cult movie audience, because it is a wonderfully entertaining piece of bizarro nonsense that’s also a time capsule of an in hindsight simpler, quieter, and certainly more hopeful even in its dystopias time.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Killer’s killer John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still attempting to somehow defeat the killer cult hierarchy known as the High Table, after begging for his life didn’t really work out for him in the third movie. Because he’s murdering goons and higher-ups like nobody’s business, the new Marquis (Bill Skarsgård) is trying to get rid of him with particular enthusiasm (and while speaking with a dubious accent that’s apparently meant to be French). This guy’s even less subtle than his predecessors, so destroying Winston’s (Ian McShane) hotel because he didn’t betray John well enough in the last film, and murdering Charon (Lance Reddick, who will be missed in real life around here) is only the beginning of what will turn out to be sending yet more hordes of goons after John.

Goons, as well as John’s old friend, the blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen), in what is probably supposed to be an attempt at psychological warfare. John for his part might just stumble upon a plan of his own. Don’t worry, it involves the only thing he’s really good at.

I was really nonplussed with the pointless circle jerk plot of the third John Wick, and didn’t particularly enjoy most of the action in it either, so I didn’t go into Chad Stahelski’s sequel expecting much of anything from it. My low expectations were considerably exceeded, and this very long, probably final for now, part of the franchise turned out to be very good fun for me. Even its rather excessive length doesn’t really keep this one down: while it might be cut by fifteen, twenty minutes, for most of the time, the epic length of any given action set piece in here is rather the aesthetic point.

For this is a movie that’s burning to make you see every single moment of choreography, every movement stuntmen make, every improvement the effects crew makes to their imperfect humanity, so it’s showing you all of it, not caring one whit if the audience becomes as exhausted as our protagonist. Camerawork and editing often feel genuinely influenced by arthouse cinema of the Slow Cinema style, Stahelski finding a nice angle and then slowly panning through the action, or rising towards the ceiling – in this case probably not to say something philosophical about the nature of humanity but to show off as much as possible in what I’m tempted to call Slow Maximalism. In many of the set pieces, the feeling of physical forward momentum comes exclusively from what stunt people and actors and post-production achieve. The camera’s just there to watch. That this works out for the film as well as it does is a compliment to everyone involved in these departments, and that Stahelski makes it work demonstrates an astonishing absence of directorial ego (which in this context may have something to do with his roots in stunt work).

At this point, the series has also become adept at filming around  Keanu’s specific weaknesses as a screen fighter, and often make him look as good as the earlier films in the series said he is.

Otherwise, this has some of the most fun archetypes of the series. The great Donnie Yen’s joyfully played morally complicated blind assassin is the obvious stand-out here, but Rina Sawayama makes a much better action heroine than you’d expect from a pop star, and Shamier Anderson’s backpacking tourist-styled tracker with a dog is also simply fun to watch interacting with the rest of the cast.

Add to this the film’s moments of genuine weirdness – like Scott Adkins in a fat suit as a German gangster who gets it in pretty bizarre nightclub fight – and it’s pretty difficult to resist the charms of John Wick, Chapter 4.

Three Films Make A Post: A dangerous land breeds a dangerous man.

Siberia (2018): I’m pretty sure Matthew Ross’s Siberia was meant to be some sort of neo noir, using its Keanu Reeves protagonist’s misadventures in shady diamond dealings and cheating in Russia as a means to show his alienation and probably say something about the US’s standing in the world right now too. Alas, what we actually get is a film whose characters are as clichéd as they are uninvolving, and played with little conviction by a cast that seem to have been provided with little usable direction. What little there is of a plot moves with all the verve of a dead snail, lacking any and all interesting detail. Direction-wise, this is a slick, personality-less concoction that looks pretty but doesn’t create a mood, or a world for its characters to inhabit, nor does it create much of a point for anything going on in it, very slowly.

Sequence Break (2017): Equally unsuccessful but at least more ambitious is this Cronenberg without the philosophy but with arcade consoles bit by Graham Skipper (whom I know better as an extremely dependable indie genre movie actor). Stylistically, this really wants to be a Panos Cosmatos movie – or at least loves the same things about Cronenberg movies Cosmatos loves – but it never quite manages to create the proper mood of dream/nightmare/insanity, and is at its heart too friendly and romantic to really hit the philsophical and aesthetical extremes of its models. It is borrowing their surfaces instead of their cores and never quite manages to convince me of its own core.

Blood and Money aka Allagash (2020): Also dwelling completely in very traditional genre structures, character types and ideas, John Barr’s movie concerning an old hunter (Tom Berenger) stumbling into conflict with a brutal gang of robbers in the Allagash is much better at bringing them to life than this week’s other films. In part, that’s thanks to Barr’s slow yet focussed direction style, in part thanks to a performance by a Berenger clearly happy to get a role with a bit of substance his late work isn’t exactly full of, and in part simply because Barr (who also co-wrote this with Alan Petherick) knows how to flesh out tropes and connect them to actual life.


It’s also a film very clear about the utter, existential uselessness of its characters’ struggles, Berenger making one bad decision after the other in a mixture of bad habit, bad luck and an ill-understood idea of redemption that’s going to redeem nobody and improve nothing in the world.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following the events of the last John Wick, our hero, sensitive mass murderer John Wick (Keanu Reeves, upon whose greatness as a person I am now apparently bound by law to sing an ode, even though he’s still not much of an actor, which seems to be rather more relevant to me when talking about him, you know, acting) is on the run, hunted by the same goofy cabal/cult running the international underworld he murdered oh so many people for. If the end of the second John Wick suggested to you that John has a plan to somehow fight back against The High Table, during the course of the film you’ll learn that he really hasn’t one apart from seeking the overlord of his now-enemies to…beg him to take him back in. Whoa.

On the plus side, on his way to there (and back again), dear John is meeting up with various old and new acquaintances (among them Halle Berry doing quite a bit of dog-based gun fu) and killing a whole lot of people in front of very sexy looking backgrounds.

So yeah, if you expected the actual story of Chad Stahelski’s third John Wick movie to go anywhere, you might very well be disappointed on finding the whole plot of this third film could very well have been squeezed into the first half hour of the fourth John Wick film, for all the way it moves the not-so epic story forward. It sure doesn’t help the plot that John is quite so much of a one-trick pony, never actually learning anything, never really changing, and so when he actually tries something different, he seems to make his new choices at random. People (and I am sometimes one of them) make fun of automatic Hollywood character arcs often enough, but for John Wick as a character, that would be an actual improvement.

However, while not much of actual import happens (John killing hordes of people is by now such a given pretending it might mean anything is preposterous), the film goes further in its direct predecessor’s attempts at building a cartoonishly-goofy yet also irresistibly baroque world made out of conspiracy theory, comic book ideas about organized crime that make the Kingpin’s organization seem plausible in comparison, and often eye-popping aesthetics. I do sometimes wish the film would use this world for more than creating mere backgrounds for its fights as if it were a level-bound videogame, but them’s the breaks.

Speaking of fights, the action sequences are of course the actual reason for the movie to exist, and for the most part, they do not disappoint, the series by now having progressed to a stage where animal-loving John inducing a horse to back-kick his enemies to death seems perfectly logical for the world it takes place in. It’s obviously silly as hell – I’m expecting he’s going to throw adorable killer puppies at his enemies in the next film – but presented with so much verve – often style, too – that it’s pretty difficult to not be on board with this sort of thing. Also damn great are Halle Berry’s dog kennel fighting style, and all kinds of absurd flourishes in nearly every action scene. The least impressive of them is probably the grand finale that sees John fight against a scenery-chewing Mark Dacascos, which depends a bit too much on an audience not noticing how awkward and stiff Reeves looks when compared to his sparring partner. But hey, at least John has been shot, beaten and cut so much at this stage, his slowing down and doing martial arts like Keanu Reeves does make some sense.


So, while John Wick 3: Electric Boogaloo is not quite as great fun as the second film, it’s also not the annoying waste of time the first one was, and still a very entertaining bit of movie videogame violence. Perhaps the fourth John Wick film will even get around to having a plot?

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

The killerest of all killers, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) murders a whole bunch of Russian gangster led by Peter Stormare using the same crappy Russian accent (note to producers: people in Sweden have a language of their own you might know as Swedish; it’s not Russian, perhaps on account of Sweden not being Russia) he puts on in American Gods because they stole Wick’s car and the picture of his dead wife in it.

Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), apparently the guy in the giant crime conspiracy that seems to control everything in these movies who allowed Wick to retire from the killing biz with said wife, sees this as a signal that Wick has come out of retirement. Seeing as Wick has a ritual debt to him these murder clowns call a Marker, Santino presses our “hero” to murder the gangster’s sister (Claudia Gerini) for him because she has inherited the family seat at the high table of the giant criminal conspiracy he’d rather have for himself.

Wick declines, so Santino blows up his house (and apparently all photos of his wife, because Wick seems not to know about the digital world). Afterwards, Wick changes his mind, pretty obviously planning to kill the sister and pay his debt and then give Santino his mind (in form of a bullet or a hundred) about blowing up his house and his photos. I probably don’t have to explain the rest of what happens in the film.

I love big dumb action movies as much as the next guy (the cheap ones probably much more than the next guy) but I didn’t really warm to the first John Wick. Mostly, if I remember right, I found the film’s all-out action attack rather exhausting with too many moments of the film showing off instead of letting the action flow naturally. I’m also pretty sure that film’s idea of what’s cool and mine are very different ones. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to me that I rather liked the second film in the series, despite it being directed by the same guy in Chad Stahelski and written by Derek Kolstad again.

Well, I thought the prologue with Wick murdering the Russians was just as annoying as the first John Wick, but afterwards, I very quickly found myself warming to a film that clearly has fun adding somewhat bizarre flourishes to the gangster secret conspiracy bits of the first movie. It’s obviously all very comic book-y, but in a way that works well as a backdrop for a film whose hero is deadly with a pencil (not to speak of guns) and that features exalted characters like Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King, a variation on the old beggar king concept, or scenes like a shoot-out in an art exhibition/cabinet of mirrors.

Unlike in the first film, this John Wick doesn’t seem to feel the need to try so hard to demonstrate how cool and loud and so on it is, so there’s even time for several ten minute blocks where nobody gets shot (or stabbed, or exploded – you get the drift) which the film uses for some fun additions to its over the top world. The characterisation and dialogue is still over the top too, of course, but that fits the context here well, too. The action itself I like much better this time around. Things haven’t become any less spectacular and physically dubious, but Stahelski’s direction seems much more clear and focused, without ever losing a sense of excitement and unironic silliness. The videogame influences on the action are much less shoved into the viewer’s face, too. As a matter of fact, Chapter 2 suggests that you can indeed use elements of third person shooters in an action movie in interesting ways.


So what’s not to like? It’s fun, it’s violent, it’s over the top without being annoying and even Keanu seems to be awake most of the time.

In short: Speed (1994)

Hilariously growly voiced cop Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and his partner Harry (Jeff Daniels) are instrumental in thwarting evil-crazy bomber Howard Payne’s (Dennis Hopper) plan of blackmailing the city of Los Angeles into paying him three million dollars lest he blow up an elevator full of people. After said thwarting, Payne is presumed dead, but of course, he’s still alive, and has a new, even more idiotic, plan: he has installed a very special bomb in a bus that’ll activate when the bus’s speed falls below the limit of 50 miles per hour.

Cars will be destroyed, stuff will explode and Jack will find sweet, sweet love (until the sequel, that is) with bus passenger turned inadvertent driver Annie (Sandra Bullock when she still mostly looked like a human being, decades before a frightening, unmoveable botox face won her an Academy Award). Well, and Harry will die, of course.

Occasional director Jan de Bont’s (also known as the man we still curse on each first full moon after Christmas for his abominable remake of The Haunting around here) magnum opus is rather good fun as the big, stupid, silly action movie it is. Sure, Payne’s plan is idiotic, the laws of physics don’t apply to anything happening in it, Dennis Hopper overacts in a disappointingly joyless manner, and Keanu Reeves is our hero, but there’s also quite a bit to like here.

The script might take place on planet action movie, but you can’t say it doesn’t know how to escalate things excellently, or that the resulting film doesn’t take its title seriously, going from one increasingly absurd stunt to the next with aplomb while actually keeping up the tension throughout. I’d even go so far as to say that the film does have at least some clever ideas, if not intelligent ones: locating it in Los Angeles with its bizarre assortment of Freeways (that still look like science fictional spaces to certain European eyes like mine) is pretty much perfect, and having Payne apparently spy on the characters via cable news live chase coverage is even mildly subversive. The dialogue’s often (one suspects thanks to an uncredited Joss Whedon doing a thorough re-write) funny in a knowingly cheesy way, and in general, the film’s rather good at providing the necessary card board characterisation in a very efficient manner. And how many action movies have you seen where the hero cop’s doomed partner makes it quite this far into the film?

While de Bont’s direction has all the grace and elegance of a sledgehammer, he is very good at the car chases and explosions aspect that makes up ninety nine percent of what’s on screen here, and even though I personally prefer my action directors to have a bit more of an eye for the poetry of violence and carnage, de Bont’s doing just fine here, perhaps for the only time in his side-career as a director.

In short: The Gift (2000)

As a widow with three kids somewhere in the rural South of the USA, Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett) doesn’t have a particularly easy life. She’s earning a living as a clairvoyant, though in her particular case, this means she is a combination of amateur social worker and amateur psychologist, helping people in her community who’d never seek or find professional help with kindness and empathy as best as she can. There’s for example Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank) who is regularly abused by her prick of a husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves), despite Annie telling her again and again she should pack up and leave; or the local car mechanic Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi), whom she is trying to help confront some deeply buried trauma that is breaking him apart inside.

Annie does have actual psychic powers, mind you. Dreams and visions do tend to tell her things, and right now, those visions are telling her there’s trouble on the horizon, though it’s unclear what kind of trouble it is. The only thing that’s sure is that it’s going to be bad.

Say what you will against Sam Raimi (we all have suffered through that thing with Kevin Costner, and various odious comic relief outings by his brother Ted, after all), but the man has always been more than just a one-trick pony, by now showing a filmography that manages to be diverse in tone and style yet still showing a consistent world view and a personal touch.

So, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that his Southern - mildly gothic and supernatural - thriller The Gift shows a filmmaker who is just as accomplished at making a character-focused film without any big set-pieces or much blood as he is when concerning himself with Bruce Campbell’s blood-spattering adventures or Spider-Man.

While its plot about guilt, murder, and ghosts isn’t terribly original – these things are what we expect in the South to happen right? - The Gift thrives on two things. Firstly, it carries a deep sense of place, turning what could be cliché South into something that lives and breathes like an actual place (from my chair in Germany I wouldn’t dare suggest an authentic depiction of the South, mind you), built up by Raimi through often surprisingly subtle framing choices and a direction style that always emphasises the bits of scenery that tell us about the place they belong to without the film ever actually pointing it out.

Secondly, there’s the acting ensemble. It’ll come as no surprise that Blanchett is pretty damn great, turning a character that could be your usual caricature medium right out of a mediocre TV show into a believable woman - in turns fragile, strong, sad, and nearly painfully compassionate without ever feeling like a sugary saint. On the other hand, it’s difficult not to be a little bit shocked by seeing Keanu Reeves do that thing I never thought he could do: act, and quite convincingly thanks to the magic casting someone against type can produce.

All of which leaves us with a calmly accomplished film that is unspectacular only in theory but in practice can knock off a pair of socks or two.