If nothing succeeds like excess, then John Wick: Chapter 4 must be some kind of action movie masterpiece.
At almost three hours, the latest instalment of the Keanu Reeves hit man franchise delivers more action, more villains and more convoluted mythology than even its entertainingly overstuffed predecessors, offering fans a veritable degustation of violence.
For those who wondered whether this once lean-and-mean series might be running low on imagination after the exhausting Chapter 3, the more-is-more approach can sometimes inspire a feeling of disengagement, the movie's pretty colours and choreographed carnage unfolding at a distance.
The action resumes, as it always does, immediately after the events of the previous film (only Reeves could get away with playing a character who's barely aged a couple of on-screen months in a series made across a decade).
Having vowed to exact revenge on the High Table, that mysterious league of assassins that dictates the profession's code of conduct, Wick incurs the wrath of senior member Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård, It).
Played by Skarsgård as a mix of overgrown private school boy and reptilian Bond villain, all sparkly tail coats and insolent pout, the Marquis is not above licking his lips after plunging a knife into an adversary's hand, nor shaking the bloodied appendage like a diplomat after he gets his way.
The Marquis punishes Wick's old friend, Winston (series stalwart Ian McShane), the manager of New York hit man hotel the Continental, and – stop me if you've heard this one before – puts a gang of elite assassins on Johnny's tail.
Chief among them is Caine (Hong Kong martial arts legend Donnie Yen), a blind hit man forced out of retirement to hunt down his old friend. Yen, who played a similarly sightless warrior in Rogue One, is one of the movie's biggest assets, gracing the action with both his moves and his mouth (his hilariously terse delivery punches holes through the often ponderous dialogue).
The pursuit quickly goes global, moving from Osaka, where Wick hides out with old assassin pal Koji (veteran Japanese star Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (pop singer Rina Sawayama), to Berlin and finally to Paris, the site of the film's extended showdown.
Shooting in lush wide-screen, series director Chad Stahelski delivers another formal embarrassment of riches: precision-tooled combat set against neo-noir lighting and maximalist colours, where nothing seems to take place in any recognisable reality. Ravishing sunrises look like old Hollywood matte paintings, hit men take tumbles that would kill any mortal muscle man, and dialogue is delivered by the actors with the rhythm of a dream.
The result is something between underworld odyssey and luxury hotel commercial — fitting for characters who, if they weren't busy beating the crap out of each other, wouldn't look out of place in the high roller room at a casino or browsing a boutique men's gift store.
(For all of John Wick's talents with guns, blades and economy of speech, his greatest weapon might be his trouser belt – seriously, the man's shirt has never once come untucked, no matter how many tumbles he takes.)
At its best, Chapter 4 adds to this eccentric flavour, pushing the action deeper into the netherworld, the mythology further toward the abstract and philosophical.
A God's-eye overhead shot, straight out of Taxi Driver, recurs throughout, affording a curiously disembodied perspective on the action. During the film's second half, the hunt for Wick is punctuated by running commentary from a radio DJ (played by Congolese Belgian singer Marie-Pierra Kakoma), whose sultry stylings – a clear homage to The Warriors – could be the sound of the ferrywoman of the dead.
A cartoonishly repugnant German crime boss (Scott Adkins), who seems to have escaped from afternoon kids' television, and a rogue assassin (Shamier Anderson) whose bloodthirsty Belgian Malinois has an amusing disregard for corpses, feel like characters half-remembered from a nightmare.
Wick's slapstick roll down a flight of Parisian stairs, meanwhile, has the repetitious hilarity of a Looney Tunes cartoon, and the film's pistols-at-dawn climax – one of the series' high points – cleverly deploys the silence and surrealism of a spaghetti western.
Only Laurence Fishburne, returning as Wick's staunch ally the Bowery King, seems to have a foothold in the real world.
Yet for John Wick: Chapter 4's many pleasures, there's something underwhelming about it at times; the sensation that the series is merely tracing its beats in an ever more solemn register – minus the fun.
An extended fight sequence set around the Arc de Triomphe is a good example: It just goes on and on, until you start wondering why the traffic hasn't stopped, or nobody takes any particular notice – lending credence, perhaps, to the idea that all of this might just be happening in some alternative dimension; a hell of the characters' own making.
But the movie's attempts to craft an existential journey for Wick aren't always supported by the script — written by Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 3) and Michael Finch — which might be the first in the series to deliver actively bad dialogue. (Derek Kolstad, the screenwriter behind the first three chapters, is nowhere to be seen.)
It all finds Reeves, not unlike his character, in a strange state of career limbo: star of the sort of lucrative franchise that would be the envy of any middle-aged Hollywood actor, but trapped in a predicament from which there seems to be no escape. (This might be the first film in which I found myself wondering whether Reeves, one of our greatest movie stars, might benefit from another rejuvenating career lull, the kind that led to, well, the first John Wick.)
With the Ana de Armas-led spin-off Ballerina already in the can and a fifth chapter reportedly in the works, it doesn't seem like Wick is going anywhere soon. As the Marquis sneers at one point, "he is but a ghost in search of a graveyard".
John Wick: Chapter 4 is in cinemas now.
