John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

John Wick 3: Chapter 3 - Parabellum 

Chad Stahelski, 2019, English-Russian-Japanese-Italian

Well you know what you came for with ‘John Wick’ so it’s a little redundant to chip at flaws when it’s big dumb excess and entertainment. The IQ is low – someone will explain the title, don’t worry – but that doesn’t stop it from trying to open up the Wick-world. Franchises are everything these days. Quietly, ‘John Wick’ seems have snuck in and taken some of the glory from ‘The Raid’ (chalk that up to being non-English, but the people that matter seem to know: after ‘The Raid’, I saw fight scenes everywhere realised they had to up the ante, not least in the ‘Daredevil’ NetFlix series).

   

It starts with the murderous properties of library books, sets a fight in a museum of antique weapons and then delivers a little horse-fu (as Keanu has called it). So, for me, this first act is the strongest sequence of action scenes, funny and outrageous in its excess and excellently executed. This is where director Chad Stahleski’s experience as a stuntman and his history with Keanu Reeves (they go back to ‘The Matrix’) is a major asset: you never feel that the editing is doing all the hard work and every now and again there’s a camera angle that really lands the punchline (eye-piercing, anyone? But the whole antique weapon’s fight contains knowing angles).

It seems to be that different people have different preferences: some think the opening act is weakest, some the middle and some the end. It’s true that when the guns come out, there is less visible invention because the film is not required to be so imaginative in its arsenal. However, Halle Berry and her attack dogs have proven a high point for many (ref. social media).

But then some seem to think ‘John Wick 2’ is better/inferior, so it seems a series more open to flexible audience’s preferences than most. It’s all fights, so maybe repetition fatigue sets in at different points for different people.

But to back-track: this takes off where the previous film finishes with Wick (Keanu Reeves) on the run with a humungous bounty on his head. This time, it’s not vengeance motivating him but simply going to one person and cameo to the next to get to the head honcho of the High Table, which controls this league of assassins. What this really does is take Wick from one fight to the next. It gets a little ‘Black Swan’ at one point and then cod-mystical (in the desert?), but it’s in obvious high debt to ‘The Villainess’, especially with that bike-and-horse fight. So, it’s derivative and undemanding and daft, yes, but it has a nice sheen and colour-scheme – filmed with a clear commercial gloss by Dan Laustsen – and the fights are exceptionally choreographed, filmed coherently without the edits getting in the way. And this is where it truly delivers. 

And it helps that Reeves is more hangdog in demeanour (sad puppy, maybe?) undermining the potential machismo. It follows a trick from ‘The Raid’ in that he is a protagonist reacting in a Why-are-you-all-making-me-be-such-a-bad-ass? way, which allows him to be both persecuted and to show how lethal he is. A film about his being an assassin would have been very different. Still, he still applies so many headshots to make sure potential threats are dead – no one-shot kills all here – that the “15” rating seems ridiculous. Reeves has little dialogue and a couple of one-liners and he’s probably no one’s idea of an exemplary actor (but stories of how nice he is are as legendary as Wick’s kill list) but when he has to show his skill as a physical actor, he doesn’t disappoint in the action scenes. Fighting on a horse is pretty impressive. And when his dourness can’t quite keep things sparking, there’s Halle Berry and ‘The Raid’ guys and Mark Dacascos (an assassin barely able to repress his hero-worship) to keep the momentum up. But it should be noted that this is not a youth-dominated word: the cast is notably mature and happily showing the youngsters how immature ultra-violence is done.

It’s a movie-movie world where seemingly everyone knows Wick by sight and no innocents really get hurt; hell, you can kill henchmen in a busy train station and no one will notice (and the film really isn’t the kind to posit this as social commentary). It’s an assassin’s world and we just live in it. They spread the full class spectrum too, from the glitz of The Continental hotel – a safe-ground for assassins until Wick decided otherwise at the end of ‘Wick 2’ – and the street homeless, weaponised by The Bowery King (Lawrence Fishburne… whose performance is perfectly in keeping with shenanigans, but is probably less embarrassing here than in ‘Wick 2’). In this Hard Man Fantasy, the whole world is against you but, thankfully, your skills and cool can overcome. And it helps that characters have no qualms about referring to Wick as “legendary” or “mythic”: they know their place.

If ‘The Raid’s detractors bemoaned its lack of narrative, its level-up games structure (“Yes, and?” responded director Gareth Evans), its skeletal structure seemed to me to be stripped of artifice, by way of Walter Hill or early John Carpenter. ‘John Wick 3’ by comparison has that pretention to cinematic narrative and world-and-franchise-building that games now have, that can often get in the way of gameplay. But Stahleski gets the balance right here. One can’t blame him for thinking that “Hey, we’re on number three here: shouldn’t we fill in a little background?” But it never gets in the way of the jaw-dropping body-count. 

Maybe this is the best entry for me because I came in knowing

what this would be and just focused on the mayhem. (And, again: such a body-count for a 15 rating.) I was perhaps lukewarm on the previous instalments, but the set-pieces of this third chapter did their work once it did the death-by-library-book. It’s undemanding, but there’s no denying I enjoyed the skill of the action. 

Headshot

Kimo Stamboel & Timo Tjahjanto, 2016, Indonesia

A man (Iko Uwais) who has lost his memory is washed up on a beach into the affections of a nurse; could he have anything to do with the vicious gangster that has just escaped prison? 

‘Headshot’ follows the action template that the bad guys are irredeemable and cartoonish, but the Mo Brothers (Kimo Stamboel & Timo Tjahjanto) stage and direct with enough flair that keeps things just the right side of trite. Yunus Pasolang's camera circles the fights and sometimes follows people thrown through windows, knowing it is best to stand back and let these guys do their thing. There is a token romantic subplot with Chelsea Islan as Ailin – and the film ends with her face rather than his, implying that this romance is what counts, but what we have come for are the fights. And it is super-violent. 

Due to ‘The Raid’, I am always going to have a soft spot for Iko Uwais who performs and orchestrates the fights, and like that film ‘Headshot’ utilises the idea that, no matter how lethal he is as a fighter, he is essentially a reborn innocent, on the side of the good, even if his backstory is a little murky. Luckily the amnesia will not effect his memory of how to fight. He is just always unlucky that he has a habit of being forced into situations where he has to say, using pencat silat, “Why do you guys keep making me prove I am such a bad ass?” This naturally expressed vulnerability is not a trait of the machismo of many action heroes, but it proves to be a good trick, his seeming defencelessness being easy to empathise with and his fighting skills being the envy of an audience that wants to triumph over all the enemies. Unusually, it does dwell on the toll this finally takes on him, but only to reunite us with his vulnerability and to wring the very last drop of pathos. The success of ‘The Raid’ was to reduce it all just to the fights but to also keep hold of the tension: ‘Headshot’ is a little too baggy with plot and lacks suspense, but the fights take up most of the time and in that it will surely satisfy.

Obligatory 2012 "BEST OF" list

Favourites of the Year:

And here are my favourite cinematic watches of the year, in no particular order:

Rampart (Oren Moverman)

The Raid/Serbuan maut (Gareth Evans)

Maniac (Franck Khalfoun)

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)

Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik)

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

The Hobbit: AnUnexpected Journey (Peter Jackson)

Life of Pi (Ang Lee)

Indeed, aside from “The Raid” (which was the most visceral action film I have seen since, well, “Casino Royale”)  and “The Hobbit”, all my other choices are character studies that often lean to the abstract side. These were the most satisfying watches to me because the acting was so examplary and the aesthetics so wonderful that I knew repeat viewings were only going to reveal how damned good these things were.

I hate voiceovers as a rule, but Elijah Wood’s soft-spoken psychopath  in “Maniac” certainly crawled into the head, helped by the p.o.v. camera (and the best subjective camera I’ve seen this year, though there was quite a bit around).

“Killing Them Softly” was as obviously political and scathing as a polemical soul tune with a deluded bunch of low-lives.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me how much I rated “Rampart”, but I found I couldn’t wait to bust out the blu-ray as soon as it was on release for a second watch: I’m an Ellroy and Woody Harrelson fan and Harrelson’s heartfelt and frightening machismo was so riveting that the vagaries of the double-crosses in the plot barely even registered.

 “Berberian Sound Studio” looks and feels like a horror film, and indeed I saw it at Frightfest, but it is something else entirely. Repeat watches are going to reveal, etc etc

Oh, I know the majority seem to dislike “The Master” greatly and feel it to be one of the most boring films ever made, apparently, but… Well it worked for me. The acting was stunning, the abstractions beguiling and… well, Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell is the performance of the year, if not one of the most remarkable of cinema, and that is in a year of excpetional performances.

Also best:

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)

Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes, mini-series 2011)

Two fantastic dramas about and for women with remarkable casts and performances;  both being leisurely, elegantly and sympathetically paced. Sumptious and very, very moving.

 Second tier:

Killer Joe: (William Friedkin) That is some low-down and dirty fun.

Two Days in New York: (July Delpy) Funny, light, smart and silly all at once. And bearing one of the funniest “soul-stealing” cameos ever put onto screen.

Sleep Tight/Mientras duermes: (Jaume Balagueró) Highly creepy Italian stalking thriller that makes the skin crawl and probably has more rightful claim to that much thrown-about accolade “Hitchcockian” than most.

Chained: Jennifer Lynch’s lo-fi serial killer and child abuse drama that isn’t quite as you might expect by the end, but one that ultimately emerges as respectful and should earn a cult following.

Looper: (Rian Johnson) Daft but immensely enjoyable time-travel fun. I am a fan of genre fair that takes sharp mid-way turns. Plus, it includes one of the most remarkable child performances ever in Pierce Gagnon.

Skyfall: (Sam Mendes) Daft but immensely enjoyable spy-fun. No, it doesn’t top “Casino Royale”, but it may be the best-looking Bond and the left-turn into quasi-Gothic imagery for the final act is certainly unexpected and something new. I hope they keep this up because surely this is the best of mainstream cinema, despite any flaws?

And upon reflection, I find myself thinking more favourably of “Dredd” (Pete Travis)than I did initially, and Todd Solondz's “Dark Horse” was pretty entertaining and scathing too.

Disappointments of the Year:

Cabin in the Woods:  (Drew Goddard) Sorry, but Nah. Horror that tries to berate its own genre is much like puritanical priests that have affairs. Also: not half as clever as it thought. Also, I have probably never quite upset so many people over my indifference and objections to the film. Heh.

End of Watch: (David Ayer) Bearer of one of the worst and inconsistant cinematic aesthetics ever.

Prometheus: (Ridley Scott) Expectation was so very high but Ridley Scott trying to trump Quatermass’ “Aliens made us” was a pretty-looking underwhelmer.  I mean, it's not awful - not at all - but no prizes. Also: stupid character behaviour tends to make a film look stupid.

American Mary: (Jen & Sylvia Soska) Intriguing premise with confused and ultimately silly resolutions. All its interesting possibilities missed for muddled horror pay-offs.

The Killing/Forbrydelsen: A bunch of strung-out TV whodunnit and police poredural cliches, albeit with some subtitled grace. Oh, and let me say as snottily as possible that I guessed the killer from episode one, yes I did. Because: cliches.

Highlights of the year:

Going to “Frightfest”.

The storm sequence of “Life of Pi”.

The cast of “The Master”.

Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell.

The cast of “The Deep Blue Sea”.

Being won over by “The Hobbit”.

Richard Parker in “Life of Pi”.

“Breaking Bad”. Because it is stunningly well written and performed and might well be the most minute-to-minute surprising and enjoyable TV show ever given over to fandom. And that’s in a world where brilliant shows like “The Wire” and “Deadwood” exist.

Having  five minute chat to Alan Jones about Dario Argento at “Frightfest”.

Finding myself the only person left in the cinema by the end of “The Master”.

Lowlights of the year:

            Too much rape on the film menu at “Frightfest”. By the time Jennifer Lynch’s “Chained “ came on, I could barely appreciate how respectful and good it was because I was sick of seeing another screaming woman being dragged across the floor to rape and torture.

            Too much incomprehible and nauseating shakey-cam in “V/H/S” (which I enjoyed) and “End of Watch” (which left me indifferent).

            The downward slide into narcissisitic fairground-ride of “Dr Who”.

So, so many that I didn’t get to see. “The Hunt”; “Sighseers”; “Moonrise Kingdom”, etc etc. *sigh*. Later…(O

The Raid

The Raid - Serbuan maut

Garath Evans, 2011, Indonesia/USA

The credits are barely done and the raid of the title is underway. Within ten minutes, the SWAT team’s stealth is blown. In twenty, the big bad guy is calling upon everyone in the high-rise hideaway for the murderous to take down the SWAT team. By thirty, there’s an all-out gun war that should please any fire-power fan used to the American means of action cinema - plus some nice use of light to please the eye - with disposable bad guys swarming like zombie hordes and the rapidly dwindling good guys hacking through floors to get away. And then, at thirty minutes when all the ammunition has run out, then things get going.

 Here is a film as one big action sequence.

And as an action film, it is one big wow.

If a film could bruise you, watching “The Raid” would leave you waking up in intensive care.  Welsh director Gareth Evens goes to Indonesia and makes exemplary martial arts film – in this case, silat, Indonesia’s native martial art. “The Raid” is in effect one long action sequence, untroubled by too much plot or narrative, even though these elements are present enough to bolster repeat viewings: quickly it goes through the shoot-out phase before getting down to its martial arts priorities. There is a dash of the sentimental in order to invest the bare minimum of character details and audience sympathy: we meet our SWAT team protagonist, Rama (Iko Uwais), when he is getting ready to leave for work, kissing his pregnant wife goodbye before embarking upon the raid in question; and later there are some sibling issues and corruption, but that’s about it. No, the true narrative and sub-plots of “The Raid” are the action sequences and the jaw-dropping hand-to-hand combat which is some of the very best ever captured on screen. There is none of the snap-snap-snap editing, the kind of every-second jump-cutting that many contemporary action editors believe heighten speed and adrenalin: no, the best action sequences allow enough space so you can actually see what is happening and how exemplary the fighting and the stunt-work is. The editing here is so fluid and complementary to the fighters that you will most likely barely note the cuts.

And “The Raid” offers wave upon wave of fight set-pieces. When the first corridor melee kicks in, after all the scary-thrilling shoot-outs and hacking through floors is done, “The Raid” truly distinguishes itself as a candidate for one of the best fight-films you shall ever see. Iko Uwais, who plays our protagonist Rama, is not the only cast member who seems to be faster than the eye and a remarkable martial artist. Indeed, most of the cast seem to be so that when the fists, feet, knees, elbows and machetes and knives fly, it’s hard to catch the breath. The punching, spinning, kicking, slashing, ducking, whacking, gutting, throwing and all out violence – and the film is very, very brutal – left the cinema audience I saw “The Raid” laughing with the outrageous riot of action and killing and as a “wow!” and shocked reaction to some of the brutality and artistry on display. Some may feel that the likes of Terence Malick and sub-genres of experimental films are “pure” cinema, but the action set-pieces of “The Raid” equally understand how purely visual film is, and probably in a more primal and visceral sense. And even if the martial arts genre clichés and weaknesses start to poke out here and there, it matters not. If you are going to use a "next level/boss fight" game-consul structure to make a feature, then this is how you do it.

For my money, although each one of the fight scenes is great, the middle half hour that features two hallway fights is exceptional. I am not a martial arts specialist but these fights alone seem to me to be two of the greatest ever filmed in cinema in their speed, dexterity, intimacy, ferocity and editing. They are also broken up by a consummate suspense scene where our hero and his injured colleague try to brave it out in a hiding place in a sympathetic resident’s apartment which only helps to meet the view that Evans knows exactly what he is doing. He does not even make the widely made mistake of allowing the sub-plot about siblings on different sides of the tracks to drag the tale into sentimentality, or that of police corruption to overburden the final moments.

For a sheer rush of adrenalin, choreography, violence and bone-crunching fun, “The Raid” is one of the best. This, people, is how it is done.    

Dredd

DREDD

Pete Travis, 2012, UK-USA-India

Well it’s got to be hard when the general public opinion starts with “It’s not as bad as that Stallone version,” but there it is. “Dredd” also suffers from coming on the heels of the hugely impressive “The Raid” with its identical plot. Action guys trapped in a crime-ruled highrise full of people trying to kill them. Perhaps, though, the problem is that Alex Garland’s story does not feel distinctively Dredd. Its Megacity One futurescape feels very much akin to the near-future grunge so familiar from, say, “Escape From New York”, “Robocop”, “The Warriors”, and a dozen others, even this season's "Looper". As is so often the case, perhaps “Blade Runner” already beat Megacity to the punch. Well, Megacity One from the pages of “2000 A.D.” probably inspired the neon urban hell of “Blade Runner” in the first place, plus the films already mentioned, so there is that. The Mega City 1 of “Dredd” feels a little cosy as a dystopia in comparison to the lunatics-on-the-loose police state hellhole of the comics, and even though the film has several decades of Dredd legacy and city psychosis to draw upon, there is, again, not enough of the uniquely Dredd here.

I, for one, have enjoyed the “Judge Dredd” comic strip on an off ever since I was a kid and I found Megacity 1 to be a terrifying place. The population seemed clinically insane and the Judges were merciless and brutal in response. A rock and a hard place barely covers it, and was Dredd hero or terrifying authority figure? I couldn’t tell. Indeed, in this version of the city he patrols, it looks like the early days of the city that appears in the comics, which maybe isn't a bad place to start but it doesn't have quite the Supporting Actor presence as fans might like, despite the Overwhelmingly Obvious Voiceover that namechecks Megacity history and geography before abandoning them for a far more stripped down B-level Judge Dredd tale.

And what to do with Dredd, a character who is deliberately two-dimensional, fascistic and authoritarian, legendary, invulnerable, unflappable and, shall we say, sociopathic and narrow in his view of the law? More than that, he is satirical. In Pete Travis’ film and Karl Urban’s winning chin performance, Dredd is droll and, most likely for the better, probably more ambiguous in the flesh. However, it is Judge rookie-psychic Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) who gets to take her helmet off and is the focus of the film’s concerns: there is the rookie/mentor narrative, the fact that she too comes from the wrong end of town (implying that Judges predominantly come mostly from the ranks of the cloned privileged?) and that she has, you know, feelings, which might interfere with good manly Judging. None of this is particularly original and engaging but this does weigh the film more in Anderson’s favour than Dredd’s, despite Karl Urban’s chin and steely line delivery. In this version of the character, too, Dredd feels a little more vigilante than lawgiver, and the social satire seems to have disappeared under a veneer of action-film brutality; oh, Dredd has always been violent, but the satire was nearly always dominant.

As it is, the dialogue is almost all exposition and not nearly witty enough, or even interesting. For a generic and overly familiar set-up and narrative, it’s far too talky. We know this plot. What we do have, rather than light-relief or wit, is what I might call the shock-relief of the ultra-violence. The slo-mo sequences brought about by the slo-mo drug poisoning the city blocks do provide a nastily graphic shoot-up sequence where the wounds and blood burst in stretched-out detail, which makes a nice relief from the fast-fast-fast and incomprehensible cutting currently in vogue for most action sequences. It is also used to give the villainess – Leana Heady, you know, out-macho-ing the men – the one moment of grace in the film, in closing; which seems perverse.

I suspect “Dredd” will continue to hold on to a very respectable reputation, especially once from under the altogether more exemplary “The Raid”, and it’s enjoyable for sure, but there is the sense that it really isn’t quite reaching its potential. Perhaps, again, the mistake is thinking this most outrageous of characters is a more vigilante fantasy rather than satire. Perhaps it’s in focusing in the action part of Dredd rather than the bizarre and the grotesque which typifies his world in the comics. If this is an early version of Mega City 1 and this film fits into a bunch of sequels – in the style of Bond, say – where the city and Dredd expand and offer up, truly, the bizarre details and urban insanity of the comics, my belief is that it would truly benefit from being part of a greater whole. So I hope for more and better.

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P.S. Oh, and I know many thought this was a good representation of 3D, but it just pissed me off that I had to pay more to watch it with glasses that caused light loss and very little improvement, if any.