Why 'John Wick: Chapter 4's body count matters
Other than the run time, the only number that matters in John Wick: Chapter 4 — the newest, longest installment in the unlikely action franchise — is the skyrocketing body count. Consider how the franchise began, with a widowed man tearing through a Russian mobster's goons to enact revenge for his murdered dog. Now think about where this series is at present. The globetrotting Wick tears through an incalculable amount of random assassins so he might, finally, return to a peaceful life.
But even against Wick, a man known as a ghost, an undefeated oncoming storm, the assassins keep on coming. The John Wick franchise is, of course, relying on a tried and true action trope, lampooned by Hot Shots! Part Deux: The inexplicable desire by any and all to kill the hero, no matter how impossible.
From Commando to Rambo: First Blood Part II comes the spectacle of unnamed, generic gunmen emerging from every corner and every hole as the fabric for the viewer's bloodletting, the cathartic release of seeing death on screen, and a further strengthening of the hero's invincibility. In those films, the killers at least had a job: They were under the employ of an army or a syndicate. In the Wick universe, however, assassins are freelancers. Their only obligation is to the High Table, a counsel of the world's most powerful mobsters. There's no clear recourse against these not-even-hired guns, say, ignoring the bounty. They could, conceivably, continue about their day only to see the report on the local news.
The franchise could easily use the trope as a crutch. But John Wick: Chapter 4 takes an interesting turn to reinvent what's a conventional conceit by tying its carnage to an analogy for unchecked ambition.
How did John Wick get here?
The Wick series wasn't always overflowing with would-be killers. The potential foes in the first film were of the personal variety, lone gunmen and gunwomen well known to the weary-eyed Baba Yaga. The shift occurred in John Wick: Chapter 2 with the introduction of the High Table as a means for exploring this regimented world where the Continental Hotel, a safe space for assassins, is consecrated ground. In this realm, a team of pinup women as switchboard operators communicates bounties to hired killers. Each murderer must operate by a certain set of standardized rules. In the second film's final scene, we see every assassin, from mothers with babies to unhoused people, receiving a text informing them of the exorbitant price on Wick's head. The Wick world expands absurdly globally, to the point where there seems to be more assassins inhabiting cities and countries than there are regular people.
In John Wick: Chapter 4, our assassinating anti-hero is still fighting for a way out of this life. He has many enemies, particularly the High Table, who are tired of his rebellion. The Marquis Vincent de Gramont (a sinister Bill Skarsgård) has promised to use every resource of the High Table to murder Wick: He forces the blind killer Caine (a captivating Donnie Yen) out of retirement and enlists the services of a newcomer Mr. Nobody (a resourceful Shamier Anderson) to hunt Wick.
The Marquis has the opportunity to allow these strategies to play out, but he allows Winston (Ian McShane), the former owner of the Continental Hotel, to goad him toward a higher prize: Collecting Wick's head himself.
Through an ancient bylaw, Wick can call a duel between himself and the Marquis. If the Marquis wins, he will get the credit for destroying the legend of the mythical hitman. If the Marquis loses, he will die. The pair plan to meet on the steps of Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Paris at dawn. If one person doesn't appear at the appointed time, the duel will immediately be forfeited, making Wick a marked man again. The Marquis hopes to game the system, first by using Caine as a stand-in for the confrontation, but primarily by raising the price on Wick's head, causing an immeasurable army of goons to take their shot.
Why risk going after John Wick?
The role of Wick fits the melancholic man-of-few-words persona Reeves has spent a career cultivating with films like River’s Edge, Constantine, A Scanner Darkly, and The Lake House. His bulletproof physicality in this film is particularly eye-catching. Direct hits by cars and precipitous falls from deadly heights barely slow him down. After a while, it's easy to wonder why anyone is still attacking Wick. Did they not see what happened to everyone else? Is the money really too good to pass up, or is their allegiance to the High Table as sturdy as the organization's assumed power?
"A man's ambition should never exceed his worth," the Marquis is told by Harbinger (Clancy Brown), a representative of the High Table. It's not idiocy or wealth infusing these low-level goons with courage. Similar to the Marquis, they want the prestige of killing the legendary Wick. Their unchecked desire can be interpreted as a physical manifestation of the Marquis' misplaced, greedy aspirations, in contrast with Wick's humble dream of living a quiet life.
Take the first set piece, which kicks off Wick's fight through the whole of Paris toward the basilica. The Arc de Triomphe becomes a swirling roulette wheel of violence, whereby Wick must maneuver past deadly cars, lethal motorcycles, buses and vans housing more goons, and a bevy of lethal men and women to simply get to the other side. Later, in an abandoned house, a bird's eye-view shot sees Wick moving from room to room to dispense with the murderers who lurk behind every corner. A disc jockey for W.U.X.I.A. radio rouses the contract killers by not just updating them on Wick's location, but also pushing their egos — punning Sacré-Cœur into Wick moving closer to their "sacred heart" and letting them know that the bounty is rising.
Nowhere, however, is the projection of the Marquis' insidious appetite more apparent than in the stairs sequence. To reach the top of the basilica, where the Marquis is seated, Wick must climb over 200 steps. In an amped-up version of the stairs scenes in Atomic Blonde, populating those steps is an army of indeterminable murderers. The rising tide of henchmen matches the Marquis' increased anxiety and the weight and toll of his ambition upon his psyche. The verticality of the set piece is another physical manifestation of not just Wick's long journey to this point, but the high esteem in which the Marquis holds himself. In between Sisyphean tumbles down the stairs, which test the resolve of Wick, each stride Wick takes is a further leveling of the playing field. And when Caine and Mr. Nobody decide to help their once foe on this upward crossing, they are not merely attacking the height itself, but also challenging an illustration of the Marquis' self-worth.
"You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church."
You might wonder why Wick is still fighting. What fuels him to get back up? Is it solely an unspeakable determination? By this point, we're so far removed from the events of the first film that the anger over his dead dog and the grief for his wife feel circumstantial at best, especially since there's only one mention of his wife (a brief flashback) in the entire film. None of Wick's actions indicate he's interested in the fame that comes with a high body count.
At the beginning of John Wick: Chapter 4, he plainly wants to kill everyone on the High Table. By the end of the film, Wick's idea morphs into killing the conceptual invincibility of the High Table, the proverbial gods of this world. His survival is a weakening of their reach. While Wick's motivation doesn't neatly fit into the built-upon narrative that's led to the fourth chapter, it does speak to the elusive desire by all involved to create and destroy myths, to burnish their names in deifying and demystifying terms.
It's no accident that the Marquis, a man who has the misplaced self-belief of a god, is ultimately gunned down at the foot of a church. The Marquis hoped his triumph would be the death of Wick's legend, thereby burnishing his own legacy.
In actuality, the Marquis' own unceremonious extermination when he attempts to finish off what he believes is a mortally wounded Wick is the price of hubris. By reimagining the high-body count trope as emblematic of ambition, John Wick: Chapter 4 imbues the final confrontation between Wick and the Marquis as something more than a match between good versus evil, hero versus baddie. It's a simple man called to extraordinary feats going toe-to-toe against a rageful expression of unchecked power. While such care to connect story to setting and impact should be expected, in the slapdash world of contemporary American action movies, John Wick: Chapter 4 once again reminds us that action movies can mean and do more than simply rely on cliche.
John Wick: Chapter 4 is now in theaters.