Chad Stahelski, 2019,
English-Russian-Japanese-Italian
So I watched ‘John Wick 3’ again just to see what I
felt about it on a second watch. It’s not the usual thing that leaves a mark on
me, and certainly the first two hadn’t, and it’s the kind of film I watch just
to keep with trends and the mainstream.
What I first noted was that it seemed to me that the
opening credits were the kind of montage and design that front TV action
series. It’s a world of sicky green, velvety purple, smouldering orange and vivid red, despite a
digression into the bronze of the dessert. It’s beautifully filmed by Dan
Lausten, giving a little slick class. It owes a debt to ‘The Villainess’
with its ballet-and-wrestling-school-for-assassins, as
well as it’s bike chase. The actors all ham it up shamelessly and I am inclined
to treat it as a comedy, so silly and over-the-top and narcissistic are its narrative
and character outbursts (and I’m still leaning towards Laurence Fishbourne as
bad here). Halle Berry’s plays it straighter than the others, as if she’s come
in from a more serious film and gives a little gravitas to proceedings. She
proves a good foil for Reeves, who delivers his one-liners with his slacker
drawl that undercuts some of the silliness in a way that a more lip-smacking
performer wouldn’t.
But none of that drew me back in. It was those first
twenty minutes that I couldn’t shake. The library fight, the museum fight and –
quoting Reeves here – the horse-fu are three knock-out set-pieces in succession
that still retained their effect on me. The fight choreography gave me the same
buzz that I got from ‘The Raid’
films: fight scenes are as pleasing as dance-offs with the
dubious punctuation of violence. It provides the same rush as good pop or rock
music. But it was even more notable this time at how well the editing facilitated
the action.
With the library scene: oh, that’s how you use a heavy
book to fight? There’s the moment when you realise they have found a way to make
books lethal, to give you that oh!
gratification.
And then there’s that moment when, having been shooting
and brawling, both Wick and his adversary take a second, look around the weapon
museum around them, and think “Wait, we have an arsenal here!” and start smashing
into the knife displays with desperate abandon. Then are the closing knife-in-the-eye
and axe-to-the-head gags that are framed for maximum effect, both for squirm-inducement
and humour (because there’s humour in outrageousness).
It's the same humour in outrageousness that gratifies when,
pursued into a stable, Wick starts to use the horses as weapons – gloriously over-the-top.
And when you think of the logistics of horse and bikes and crashes, all in the
same take, the film-making skill is evident.
These are each great set-pieces that would have been peaks
in other films. And then it gets bogged down in plot and world-building and the
silliness takes over. But upon a second watch I enjoyed the shoot-out-with-attack
dogs more than before because this time I could see the skilful editing, timing
and framing. And boy, so many headshots. It’s a very violent film.
Sometimes I can take a film for it’s set-pieces: I have a
friend that felt the uneven nature of ‘Ad Astra’
showed that James Gray failed at narrative,
and that may be so, but again that film’s sci-fi set-pieces won me over despite
the unevenness (well, that and Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography wowed me). Tarantino’s
films are often a sequence of grandiose set-pieces. Jodorowsky’s odysseys are
built on moments and vision rather than coherence. If there’s inventiveness,
skill and pleasing aesthetic, that alone can impress. But there are many
superficial pleasures to be had and quite often the overall vision can
compensate for narrative weaknesses.
So, those opening set-pieces of ‘John Wick 3’ still
strike me as worthy and impressive in their talent, inventiveness and execution,
and that half hour alone will still gain marks from me, although I may find it easy
to b thee indifferent to the rest of it.
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