To grasp how John Wick's action sequences work it's instructive to watch how other films execute their own. Take Winter Soldier's opening ship set piece whose action is every bit as professionally staged. The difference is in the editing. Winter Soldier is cut to the beat of its blows; each edit lines up neatly with Captain America's fists meeting faces. Violence is its punctuation. However for John Wick violence is the subject. Though the goriest wounds may be hidden in shadows the impacts themselves are shown in full and soundtracked to elicit winces. Its punctuation is death.
You can build a movie out of the endless ways to meet one's maker - Parabellum shifts ably from South Korean inspired brutality to Keaton-esque slapstick to third person cover shooting - but how to build a franchise (now spanning three movies, a comic series, a video game and god knows what else) out of a movie whose bread and butter is endings? Up until now the answer has been to invest ever more heavily in its "mythology"; a bunch of rituals, phrases and tchotchkes given unearned weight by exaggeratedly dignified turns from Ian McShane and Lance Reddick.* Once again Parabellum piles on more layers to the increasingly creaky edifice - calling on Asia Kate Dillon to embody cold, impersonal power.
It also seeks to expand the building - travelling to Casablanca for a little incidental filling of gaps that would probably better serve as windows. I think what they’re going for here is a cosmopolitanism that extends the rituals and fine clothes to different contexts: here are the tattoos you're familiar with but this time they're in Arabic. Alas what they end up with looks more like the same old western exoticism. It’s an unintentional crassness that nonetheless fits right in with the intentionally garish subtitles and the way cuts from The Four Seasons and The Nutcracker are made vulgar by both ubiquity and modern remixing.
By its end Parabellum seems to be recognizing the futility of such endeavours - acknowledging that there's only so much interest that can be gained from an ever proliferating set of phrases and titles and suggesting that it’s time to bring the whole thing tumbling down. It is merely a suggestion at this stage though and the film’s Ouroboros-like plot, in which possibilities are done away with as soon as they are raised and kingdoms are reestablished as soon as they are razed, gives no hope for an escape.
Parabellum’s treatment of John Wick is similarly cyclical. He is a man without a future, only able to locate more facets of his identity by delving into the past. There are never any new friends, only old associates. It's almost admirable to refuse the standard device of giving him new things in order to take them away. Even more so given that the film is self-aware; letting Wick himself state that his reason for living is the remembrance of old things and not creation. But there’s no future in it.
If there is a way out it may lie in the embrace of actual mythology. There’s a fresh potency in the Bowery King surveying his new chthonic realm from a throne and a new kind of power in John Wick having acquired a kind of Hekate-like liminality as a result of coming completely unmoored from life and death as we know them.
PS: I greatly enjoyed they way Mark Dacascos' fanboy villain is used to poke at the hoary conventions Parabellum otherwise plays straight.
*I personally feel that the praise stems mostly from John Wick having had something where other films of its ilk have nothing.
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