John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum

I found John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum fun, but not great fun. It carries on a lot of what was built in Chapter 2, without really taking it further.

(The original is still essentially self-contained, the worldbuilding just there for fun. The sequels run with it.)

The fights are cool, obviously (though the best of them are at the start, I think, including the big audience groan moment of the film) but for something called a chapter in a larger story it feels like the story hardly advanced.

We begin with John on the run from the High Table with one questionable ally backing him, and we end there too. Oaths are made and then quickly broken to no real effect. Allies are introduced and used up.

I like that it called back to all these being started by somebody from Game Of Thrones messing with a hero’s dog, but all the talk of going back to the beginning would have sat better if this were the end.

I did laugh when John brings up a life debt thumbprint and says “this is your blood, your bond.”

The meeting with the Elder feels a bit much, even for John Wick, a lurch too far into the mystical for a setting where there’s a secret order of criminals with killers on every street corner.

Likewise the reappearance of the archive and switchboard staffed entirely by people in retro-50s secretary styles mixed with heavy tattoos, which was the real “huh?” moment for me in 2, not just eccentric vampire-y assassin style in semi-public space but The Warriors level super-eccentric style where nobody will see it.

And getting a master assassin to show loyalty and willingness to kill people for you by cutting off one of his fingers - not a trigger finger of thumb, but still - is not a good plan.