Please don't get upset by the title of this article. I love the John Wick movies! In fact, I’d rank all four of them 10 out of 10.
Just like our very own Jason Wiese said, I definitely cosign John Wick being the greatest action movie franchise of all time. (That’s “franchise,” mind you, not greatest action movie, singular. That distinction still goes to Commando).
However, did we really need four movies to tell his story? Well…
Oh, and massive spoilers up ahead. You’ve been warned!
Sort Of?
Look, I loved John Wick: Chapter 4. Just as said in Eric Eisenberg’s review, I thought it may very well be the best of the sequels (even though I’m torn since I really love John Wick: Chapter 2). I mean, there’s just so much going on in this movie that it all feels necessary. We got Donnie Yen as a blind assassin, Bill Skarsgård as a slimy new villain, and most importantly, we got the official end of John Wick.
That’s right, they actually killed him off! When they showed his grave at the end, I was pretty stunned. I mean, here’s a guy who literally fell off a building and survived, and you’re really going to kill him off in a duel? Seriously?
Yes, seriously, and I actually applaud them for going with that ending, because I honestly didn’t want a John Wick: Chapter 5, since I can only suspend my belief for so long.
In fact, I was a little surprised that his hand didn’t shoot out of the dirt after Winston and the Bowery King left his gravestone. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for this series. So, yeah, I guess four movies were necessary to finally get to this conclusion…
But Not Really
You know what? I’m a simple man. And, as a simple man, do you know what I like? Trilogies. All the best movie series have them. Lord of the Rings? Check. Back to the Future? Check. The original Star Wars trilogy, with A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi? Check. I mean, come on, now. When it comes to movies, the trilogy is sacred. It’s when you start getting into number four and beyond that a series really starts to get long in the tooth.
For example, how much better would Toy Story have been if it ended at Part 3? Sure, Toy Story 4 wasn’t bad (In fact, it’s pretty good). But, how much better would that series have been if it ended with Andy giving his toys away to that neighborhood girl, and then he goes off to college? It’d be perfect.
What about Indiana Jones? Sure, I’m a Crystal Skull apologist, but even I’ll admit that the series would have been better off if it just ended at Last Crusade. It was honestly the perfect way to cap off that trilogy.
So, why then did we need four films in order to kill off John Wick? I’m not saying that Chapter 3 should have been the conclusion, given how that movie ended, but couldn’t Chapter 4 have been that film instead? Looking back at Chapter 3, I loved it for all of its action sequences (especially those with Halle Berry), but of the four films, I definitely feel like it's the weakest link in the series, as it sort of feels like filler, awesome action scenes be damned.
That Said…
No John Wick film exists in a vacuum. And, even though I just kind of threw shade on John Wick: Chapter 3-Parabellum, I also can’t deny that it has some of my very favorite scenes in the entire series, one of which being when they defend The Continental (which was unceremoniously brought down to a pile of rubble in Chapter 4).
In fact, every single movie in the franchise has so many epic fight scenes that it would be tragic if one of these movies didn’t exist. Like, how about that library fight scene in Parabellum? Or the horse stable fight? Or the knife throwing scene?
I mean, as much as I kind of find Chapter 3 to be the weakest film, narratively speaking, there’s no way I can live without any of those fights. The same goes for the recent film, which has some of my favorite moments in the entire series, like when John is fighting on the stairs, or when the camera goes all, top-down, Hotline Miami-style, and he incinerates enemies to death with a new weapon.
In a lot of ways, I feel like I can just isolate some of the fights from all of these movies and not even think about the stories, which is kind of the point and why these movies are so successful in the first place. It’s not like people come to see a John Wick flick for its super rich storytelling. We’re here because we all love Keanu Reeves (no matter the decade), and he’s a serious badass in this role. So, did we really need four movies to tell such a simple narrative? Well, no…
But In The End
We did. It’s kind of crazy to think that we went all the way from John Wick getting revenge for the death of his dog, to him fighting people at the high table, but here we are. I actually had to re-watch the first movie before I wrote this article just to remember how it all began, and seriously, this series has come a long way.
So much so, that the franchise has created its own universe. We’re getting the prequel series, The Continental, and then, we have the John Wick spin-off, Ballerina. Hell, just like we have Souls-like games when it comes to Dark Souls imitators and similar games from FromSoftware, we even now have a John Wick-like movie in Sisu, which looks like the franchise if he was Finnish and fought Nazis.
All this is to say that while John Wick, as a series, might have been more compact and better told if it were only three movies, I truly do think it needed to be four in order to expand the universe, but also to go on long enough that it can even have imitators within the medium.
So, even though I would never want a Chapter 5, I’m cool with there being four films. For more news on all things John Wick, make sure to swing by here often.
