Shamier Anderson | Through the Shattered Lens

Yesterday, I finally watched the hit film of March 2023, John Wick: Chapter Four. It left me overwhelmed and I mean that in the best possible way.

The film picks up where the last film left off. John Wick (Keanu Reeves), the dog-loving, formerly retired professional hit man, is still traveling the world and killing the leaders of the High Table. As becomes apparent from the start of the film, it’s a bit of a fool’s errand as killing one leader only leads to another leader being installed. When John travels to Morocco to kill the leader known as “The Elder,” he discovers that the Elder he knew is gone and has been replaced with a new Elder. He still kills the new Elder because that’s what John Wick does. He kills people. He’s a literal killing machine, one who audiences like because he loves dogs, is still mourning for his dead wife, and he’s played by Keanu Reeves. On paper, the relentless and ruthless character of John Wick is horrifying. But, when he’s played by Keanu Reeves, he becomes the killing machine that audiences can’t help but love.

The arrogant and brilliantly named Marquis Vincent Bisset de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard, giving a wonderfully hissable performance) is currently in charge of the efforts to track down and kill John. The Marquis establishes himself as being evil by not only killing Charon (Lance Reddick) but also blowing up the Continental. Upset by the murder of Charon and the destruction of his business, Winston (Ian McShane, playing his role with the perfect amount of wounded dignity) tells John that he can end his entire war with the High Table by challenging the Marquis to a duel. Unfortunately, to do that, John has to convince another criminal organization to sponsor him and just about criminal organization on the planet wants John did. To make things even more difficult, the Marquis has brought the blind assassin, Caine (the incredible Donnie Yen), out of retirement to track down John. Caine and John are old friends but Caine knows that his daughter will be killed unless he kills John.

Clocking in at 169 minutes, John Wick: Chapter Four is a big, flamboyant, and at times overwhelming production. John Wick travels across the world and every country in which he finds himself is home to someone who wants him dead. And since everyone that John Wick knows seems to have a unlimited supply of guards and henchmen, the fights are nonstop and the violence is over the top but the film is so energetic and cheerfully excessive that it’s never boring. Each fight scene feels like it could be a separate film on its own, with each member of the cast getting a chance to show off what they can do. The water-filled fight in a Berlin night club is the film’s best moment but it’s closely followed by an extended combat sequence that’s set in a hotel in Japan. With its vivid cinematography and ornate production design and its spectacular stunts, John Wick Chapter 4 is a work of pure cinema, an thrill ride of glorious excess. Along with providing an ending to John Wick’s story, it also pays tribute to everything that audiences love about action cinema. It’s a film for people who love action and, even more importantly, it’s film that has as much love for its audience as it does for itself.

The film ends on a note of apparent finality, one that becomes more ambiguous the more that one examines it. This may be the last chapter of John Wick’s story or it may not. (Considering the film’s box office and critical success, I suspect that it will not be the last.) John Wick Chapter Four serves as a fitting (if perhaps temporary) end to the saga and also a tribute to both the action aesthetic and Keanu Reeves’s innate likability.

Do you remember Race?

It came out in February of this year and it was kind of a big deal for a week. I think everyone was expecting it to be a big hit, just because there’s never much competition in February. Race is a biopic of Jesse Owens, the African-American runner who sets world records and won gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, defeating a legion of Aryan athletes while Adolf Hitler watched from the stands. Not only is that a compelling story but 2016 was also an Olympic year. Eddie The Eagle had already been a success due to the Olympic connection. Add to that, Focus Features promoted the Hell out of this film. In they weeks leading up to its release, I saw commercials for it on a nearly hourly basis. The reviews, when the came, were mixed but generally positive.

I’m not really sure how Race did at the box office. According to Wikipedia, on its opening weekend, it was sixth at the box office. Apparently, the film only had a budget of five million and ultimately made a profit of $20,000,0000. I guess that would make it a success. All I know is that it seems like, for all the hype, Race just kind of came and went.

In fact, I didn’t see Race until about two months ago. It’s one of those films that’s not really great but it’s certainly not bad. It’s pretty much the epitome of being adequate. It was well-made and generally well-acted. Director Stephen Hopkins occasionally struggled to maintain a consistent pace (Race is over 2 hours long and feels longer) but he still did a good job filming the scenes of Owens of running and competing. In the role of Jesse Owens, Stephan James was well-cast. You not only believed him in the dramatic scenes but he was also believable as a record-setting athlete. He had some great scenes with Jason Sudekis, who was surprisingly believable in the role of Jesse’s coach.

With all that in mind, why didn’t Race make more of an impression? I think that, too often, Hopkins allowed the film’s focus to wander away from Jesse and the inner conflict he felt as he won medals for a country where he was treated like a second-class citizen. There were too many random scenes of Jeremy Irons and William Hurt, playing Olympic officials and debating whether or not to boycott Hitler’s Olympics. During the second half of the film, Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) showed up and we got a few scenes of her trying to film Jesse’s triumph at the Olympics despite the interference of Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbles (Barnaby Metschurat). All of these extra scenes are supposed to set Jesse’s struggle in a historic context but they’re unnecessary and distracting. All the context that the film needs can be found in the fact that Jesse was a black man living in America in the 1930s.

For the most part, Race is uneven but occasionally the film delivers a powerful scene or two. One of the most powerful parts of the film comes when Jesse, after setting world records and being proclaimed as a hero across the world, is informed that he still can’t enter a New York club through the front door. As well, the scenes depicting Jesse’s friendship with German jump Luz Long (David Kross) are poignant. In fact, they’re so poignant that I initially assumed that they were fictionalized for the film but actually, Jesse and Luz Long did become good friends during the 1936 Olympics.

Race is uneven but it’s not bad. Stephan James gives a good performance as Jesse and, if nothing else, the film provides a worthy history lesson.