John Wick: Chapter 4

A Sisyphean Bullet Ballet

I honestly thought those stairs were going to finish him. Late in *John Wick: Chapter 4*, John has to climb the 222 steps to Sacré-Cœur in Paris while every landing is clogged with armed killers. He claws his way up, bleeding and shooting and barely staying upright, only to get booted all the way back down again. It's bleakly hilarious. Pure Buster Keaton by way of terminal despair. That long, humiliating tumble pretty much sums up the whole *John Wick* saga: every time the man gets close to peace, the universe—or more specifically the administrative fever dream called the High Table—kicks him back into the dirt.



Chad Stahelski knows exactly how big and strange this thing has become. He's not pretending the violence belongs to the real world anymore. He's making myth now. He’s talked about mixing Sergio Leone, Zatoichi, and Greek tragedy, and for the most part he gets there. *Variety*'s Owen Gleiberman nailed it when he wrote that the movie feels like "Sergio Leone crossed with John Woo as seen in Times Square." Stahelski and cinematographer Dan Laustsen light these massacres like religious paintings gone feral. The frame drops into deep black so the neon pinks and sickly ambers can flare when the guns go off. It isn't gritty. It's ceremonial.

For all that style, the movie would be a grind without something recognizably human in the middle of it. (At nearly three hours, it comes close to becoming a grind anyway). That's where Donnie Yen comes in. As Caine, a blind assassin dragged back into the life to hunt his old friend John, Yen gives the film its sad center. He reportedly pushed back on the original script so the character wouldn't be stuck with generic mandarin-collar clichés, and the difference shows. His whole performance lives in his carriage. He moves with the tired reluctance of a man who hates this work but will do it to protect his daughter. When Caine fights, there's nothing frantic about him. He's precise, irritated, efficient—the posture of someone finishing a chore he never wanted.



Then you get to the Arc de Triomphe sequence, which I still can't believe they pulled off. Wick is battling assassins in the middle of a roaring multi-lane roundabout where traffic never really stops. People bounce off cars like pinballs. What makes the scene so unnerving isn't just the gunfire; it's the world around it, moving with total indifference. Stahelski keeps the action wide and legible, letting us watch Reeves—or his fearless stunt doubles—take the hits in full view. Every collision lands in your back.

Against all that effort, Bill Skarsgård's Marquis de Gramont glides through the movie like pure inherited rot. If Wick is bruised labor, the Marquis is effortless power. Skarsgård plays him as a decadent French aristocrat who never dirties his own hands, only gives orders from lavish rooms while other men bleed on his behalf. He turns the franchise's worldview into something almost explicitly anti-capitalist: it doesn't matter how exceptional you are at the job, the people at the top will still treat you as disposable.



And really, it always comes back to Keanu Reeves and the way his body moves. He's pushing sixty now, and he lumbers like a man hauling a refrigerator up a hill. That's not a knock. It's the movie's whole feeling. John barely needs dialogue because the stiffness in his walk tells you everything about the grief he has been dragging through four films' worth of bullets, falls, and broken glass. Whether this counts as a proper end depends on your appetite for this much ornate suffering. But when the credits finally rolled, I didn't get that empty blockbuster buzz. I just felt relieved that maybe, finally, the man could lie down.