Late in the fourth film bearing his name, indestructible hitman John Wick (Keanu Reeves) falls down some stairs. Quite a few stairs, actually – tossed by an enemy down the 222 steps of Paris’ famed Rue Foyatier on his way to the final showdown at the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, he tumbles down one flight after another like a Slinky in an immaculately tailored suit. He finally crumples on to a landing, only to get hurled once more down the rest of the stairs, at which point the absurd amount of time spent watching him roll back over the path he just climbed turns into its own deadpan, sisyphean joke.
This bit isn’t quite as funny during the rest of John Wick: Chapter 4’s bloated two hours and 49 minutes, though it’s not really meant to be. To crib a phrase, everything happens so much to our killing-machine hero as he blazes a bloody trail from New York to Osaka to Berlin to Paris. Scene after scene drags on far past the point of redundancy, the zillion solemn ceremonies and over-the-shoulder flips landing in monotony without the saving grace of a winking laugh. An entirely earnest and altogether fatal fondness for itself has drawn out a franchise once prized for its lean-and-mean ferocity into a logy death march set at a dirge’s pace. Roger Ebert memorably declared that no good movie is too long, his point not that fun can go on forever, but that a well-told story takes as long as it takes. Wick’s latest outing indulges in muchness for its own sake, and where unrestrained excess has blown open the gate for mad inspiration in so many others, the director, Chad Stahelski, lacks the showman’s instinct for building and payoff.
