Just a few minutes into John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, we get to witness something beautiful. Jason Mantzoukas, as a character known as “the Tick-Tock Man,” addresses Keanu Reeves, who plays the titular assassin. The Tick-Tock Man is crouched by a dumpster in an alley for reasons made apparent when you see the movie, and a sinister grin spreads across his face as Wick realizes who he is.
“Tick tock, Mr. Wick,” he says, an evil gleam in his eye. “Tick tock,” he sneers. “No time to dilly-dally, Mr. Wick.”
C’mon. That, right there, is transcendentally silly greatness. That’s everything I want at the movies (well, sometimes).
Much like the formerly retired assassin himself, the John Wick franchise (inaugurated in 2014, with a Chapter 2 in 2017) is GOAT in its action-movie category and has not yet failed to deliver. Among its contemporaries, John Wick, in a word, rules.
Parabellum is just as satisfying as its predecessors, and not just because of the Tick-Tock Man. It is not, to be clear, a smart or wise movie — it’s just a really fun one. It fills out Wick’s universe a bit more without being too hung up on constructing an elaborate and coherent mythology, and it delivers some truly eye-popping set pieces.
And that’s what makes Parabellum, and the whole John Wick franchise, so good: how it looks on screen matters more than what it says, and it always has. These movies never take themselves too seriously. Though the John Wick movies tell the story of a grieving man out for revenge, they never try to say very much about either grief or revenge. The story, in the John Wick world, is there to serve up great images — it’s more pure cinema than intricate storytelling, and that’s what makes it great.
John Wick is back, baby
The word “parabellum” is part of a longer Latin maxim: si vis pacem, para bellum — if you want peace, prepare for war. It’s the kind of phrase that could apply to any generic action franchise involving assassins and shadowy crime syndicates, but it also stands in nicely for the arc of the John Wick series thus far.
Wick, one of the deadliest assassins in the world, started the series in retirement, mourning his beloved wife Helen, who died of a terminal illness, and then his beloved puppy, after some hooligans killed it and stole Wick’s car. Which was a very bad move on their part.
John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2 chronicle the fallout, as a bereft Wick, who really just wants to be left alone to live his life, is sucked back into the shadowy underworld of professional assassins. They maintain a highly organized society (overseen by a group of crime lords known as the High Table) involving codes of conduct, pseudocurrencies, pacts of various kinds, and a network of luxury hotels in which no “business” (i.e. killing) is allowed. Wick, who’d managed to get out of the business entirely, is now in the middle of it again, and he is still very, very good at killing — especially if the person he’s after is also a highly trained assassin.
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, directed once again by former stuntman Chad Stahelski, picks up moments after Chapter 2 left off with Wick about to become a hunted man. But what mostly follows is an excuse to let Wick do what he does best — kill — among set pieces that are very fun to look at, including a chase sequence involving a horse and motorcycles. It’s exactly what we’d expect, and want, to see from a John Wick movie.
There are occasional story moments meant to move things forward. We learn a little more about the assassins’ world, both what makes it tick and how it operates. (For instance, I would not have guessed that the list of open assassination contracts would be maintained by nattily dressed young women using an old-fashioned chalkboard in a room full of ringing phones, but that’s just me.)
We also learn a smidge more about Wick’s own background, which turns out to be much weirder than I expected and includes a sort of orphanage, run by Anjelica Huston, housed in one of those cavernous theaters you can find in the outer reaches of Brooklyn. Also, there are lots of scenes in the Continental, as well as a similar hotel in Morocco, run by Halle Berry. And yes, there are dogs.
The plot of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum takes a back seat to terrific imagery
But anything resembling a plot in Parabellum really exists for one reason: to get us from cool-looking scene to cool-looking scene. When I saw the first film in the series, I thought it seemed vaguely like what would happen if Nancy Meyers directed an assassin movie, what with Wick’s improbably gorgeous house and the sleek, sophisticated Continental. Now, in its third installment, the series has grown into what would happen if the entire Travel Channel directed a movie, with Wick’s story hurling him from New York to the furthest reaches of the planet and back again.
And the choreography! This series has always been notable for how it frames action scenes as wide, lush images rather than cross-cut close-ups, so that you can watch it as if it were a dance. In Parabellum, as in its predecessors, action scenes are graceful, limber, almost balletic. In this movie, that very nearly becomes literal; in one scene, a ballet performance gets interrupted by intruding assassins, to great visual effect.
In fact, I think the entire John Wick enterprise may work best if you think of it as ballet. In traditional, classical ballet, there’s often a plot — about swans or nutcrackers or dolls or broken-hearted lovers — but the plot is never the point; it’s the dancing, the athleticism, and the lyrical beauty of the human body. We are swept away by the musicality and emotion of bodies in motion, and we are meant to be.
The dance-like sensibility is what makes John Wick so lovely to watch. Yes, the world of the assassins is entrancing, and the cast — especially Reeves, who holds the whole thing together — is uniformly great. The flashes of humor and kookiness (as with the aforementioned Tick-Tock Man) keep the whole thing from taking itself too seriously.
But the story, in a number of places, teeters on the edge of flat-out stupid — recall the above Tick-Tock Man exchange — and the mythology is too thin to be very interesting; what makes the whole thing so incredibly fun is that it looks great. Stahelski has a keen sense of balance and movement, and he stages fights and set pieces like a choreographer. It’s a joy to watch.
Should the John Wick universe have a more coherent mythology? Should it come up with some kind of a point it wants to make? Should it, in other words, try to become a smart series of movies at some point?
No, I don’t think so. Whatever it lacks in narrative intelligence it makes up abundantly in visual moxie, and in a medium that is first and foremost visual, that’s what makes something great. I love the John Wick movies; I’m not alone. Let’s hope they always aim to be as great as a ballet.
John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum opens in theaters on May 16.