John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Director Chad Stahelski is back directing our favorite hit man with an existential bent, John Wick, in this third chapter. The film is just as stirring (if a bit less of a surprise) as the second chapter with plenty of rhythmic and percussive action to please its fans.

Wick (Keanu Reeves) is literally racing against time to get out of a contract from the second episode involving the Russian mafia. Believe it or not, the man in black is trying to get to the New York Public Library while bleeding. Once there, he gets the required marker, some rosary beads and a nostalgic picture of his wife Helen in black-and-white.

Then the trouble starts.

You have to hand it to a film that can have a book as a lethal weapon.

Wick is on the run of course, this time enlisting a horse for help that has brutal back legs.

Wick is on a mission with only his wife’s memory to sustain him. He does a savage jazzy jujitsu routine, hobbling his way into a theatre to meet The Director (Anjelica Huston) to painfully gain access to Sofia (Halle Berry) another ranking member on the High Table totem.

Wick meets Sofia (a figure from his past) but the adventure is far from warm.

In addition to Sofia, there is a taciturn Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon) reminding one of Ursa in Superman II.

This is usual “John Wick” fare but Reeves’ deadpan delivery has something kitschy and darkly comic that even Christian Bale in “The Dark Knight” did not achieve.

Surrealistically, the more Wick gets injured the more energetic he becomes. John Wick and Reeves by extension become living figures in a comic book. This makes the hyperactive hollow-points compulsively watchable, even though it does qualify as a guilty pleasure.

Halle Berry does exceedingly well as an assassin with a heart and the film carries a very definite and well deserved pro-canine message. While the violence and gunfire is preposterous, there is something Inferno-esque and teasingly literary in Wick’s endless Grand Guignol struggle. As campy as Keanu is, he delivers his lines with such mirthless monotone, he fuses the actor as hitman and the hitman as actor into Pop Art.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com