‘John Wick Chapter 4’: There’s No Strength in Your Numbers
The John Wick films are great fun, but there’s so much fight choreography you can’t help but notice the staging.
FRIENDOS, I am not a tough man1. The few childhood fights I got into were shambolic affairs more ridiculous than brutal, and as an adult I’ve pursued diplomacy and cowardly retreat in order to defuse physical confrontations, with very few regrets2. And when watching most action films I’m often struck by the sheer exhaustion all the characters must be feeling; professional boxers, wrestlers, and mix-martial artists train like crazy to be capable of keeping up a fight for forty minutes or so, and they’re usually not catching bullets and knife wounds while they do so3.
Of course, that’s part of the thrill of watching an action film: Seeing preternaturally attractive people perform near-superhuman feats of strength and fighting. Certainly that’s the case in the John Wick films, which I enjoy immensely. Beneath the increasingly ridiculous mythology of the John Wick universe4, beneath the uncanny charisma of Keanu Reeves, there’s the spectacular fight choreography as John Wick murders the world entire over the course of four movies. It’s terrific fun! And the latest film in the series, the imaginatively titled Chapter 4, has so many fight sequences, and they are so long, that something funny happens: You start to notice the staging5.
Excuse Me While I Catch My Breath
The central conceit of a film like John Wick is that Wick is a superhuman killing machine, the Baba Yaga who kills several men with a pencil. The whole idea is that when that dumb prick kills John’s dog in the first film, he unleashes a force of utter destruction on the underworld. From that moment on, all the forces of that underworld begin working to destroy Wick in self-defense, which means he has to fight an almost endless stream of faceless, nameless assholes who all come heavily armed and leave in body bags. This is part of the fun of these movies, and I totally support it6. But when you watch several of these sequences in a row you can’t help but notice the Waves.
Essentially, despite the fact that Wick is fighting a dozen or a hundred such doomed souls, they come at him in Waves—small groups, one or two at a time. And while Wick is fighting one group of doomed souls, the other couple dozen or hundred are ... well, no one rightly knows, because we can’t see them, because they are certainly absolutely nowhere near John Wick7. They wait, politely, for Wick to headshot the current trio of attackers before rushing in to do their part8.
Now, this isn’t something unique to the John Wick franchise—just about any film with a huge fight scene will employ this video game-like staging. It’s necessary: For one thing, your suspension of disbelief would boil away if these action scenes devolved into the Burly Brawl from The Matrix: Reloaded, still one of the most ridiculous fight scenes ever staged in the history of cinema9. For another, having a hundred guys swarm over Wick would be a nightmare of choreography. Imagine trying to plausibly show John Wick defeating a hundred guys at once, and your brain breaks10.
To solve for these problems, all of these massive fights ask you to imagine that the bad guys show up in force, then slowly drip in a few at a time while everyone else stands around taking a smoke break or something. Once you notice it, you can’t unnotice it, in the same way once you notice how slowly Christian Bale moves as Batman in the Christopher Nolan movies you can’t unnotice it11.
Bring Me Everyone. What Do You Mean, ‘Everyone’? EVERYONE
There are ways to mitigate the inherent ridiculousness of the ‘one man absolutely destroys a hundred attackers single-handedly’ trope. In Léon: The Professional, the contract killer Leon (Jean Reno) has to deal with a large number of assailants, but rather than engage them in ad hoc combat all at once, he lures them into his apartment in small groups, where he is ready for them with traps and staging. In Atomic Blonde, the big oner where Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) fights off a team of bad guys is broken up by the physical layout of the space—the bad guys are spread out, allowing Lorraine to engage them in small groups organically (even so, the bad guys do an awful lot of standing around catching their breath while she dispatches their friends)12.
John Wick: Chapter 4’s big burly fight scenes are more challenging because they take place in big open spaces, by and large, where it becomes more obvious that bad guys are just ... standing around watching? … while John murders several of their colleagues13. In the big fight at the Arc d’Triumph, mooks arrive by the carload precisely when John has freed up some murderin’ capacity. In the final battle as he struggles to get up the 237 stairs leading to Sacré-Cœur, the bad guys politely come down in small groups instead of rushing him and overwhelming him, even when he’s injured and flagging.
I should note that none of this takes away from the achievement of the director, choreographers, and actors in these scenes—these fights are entertaining as hell and a lot of fun to watch. It’s just one of those things that you can’t ignore once you notice them, and they begin to haunt your watching because every time John Wick requires more than three seconds to murder someone, you wonder why the other 50 attackers don’t just rush in, guns blazing14.
And I won’t even start complaining about the apparently godlike cardio of these people. If I jog up the stairs in my house I have to sit down for a moment, but John Wick can apparently fight his way up 237 stone steps (and be thrown down them several times) and he can actually stand up unassisted, much less keep fighting at an Olympic level of badassery. Am I just out of shape? Don’t answer that15.
Next week: M3gan and The Villain Shuffle
I once got a splinter and spent so much time bellyaching about it The Duchess just sat me down and ripped it out of me in a fashion so brutal I am still scarred by the experience.
And most of these regrets have to do with cocktails left behind more than anything else.
Unless they are; I’m not as familiar with MMA rules as I pretend sometimes when I want to seem cool.
Seriously: How Ian McKellan hasn’t shown up in full Papal regalia as a character called THE IMPERATOR is a mystery.
Thanks to The Bear, I now always pronounce this stahjing in my head and it’s a problem.
This is also why I like to play first-person shooters in God Mode and refuse to apologize for it. Mowing down your enemies while encased in plot armor or cheat codes is fun.
Which is actually wise, so maybe these nameless assholes are smarter than we think.
Lord knows if I got hired to be muscle in some murky international crime syndicate and I got dispatched to deal with a man known as THE BOOGEYMAN who kills people casually with pencils, I’d sneak off to the bathroom and hide in stall until it was over, then creep out, smear some blood on my face, and tell my superiors I survived due to my powerful charm.
Keanu Reeves murdering three guys with sick karate chops and slick Navy SEAL-style gun handling? Sure. Keanu Reeves murdering 37 guys via steely glares and unkempt facial hair? Not so much.
The Wachowskis actually had their combatants in the Burly Brawl look almost identical, which is just cruelty.
It’s like Batman is fighting people in a vat of transparent gelatin.
To be fair, I do a lot of standing around catching my breath and all I do is drink whiskey and contemplate my mortality.
I like to imagine all the nameless assholes are having a Bull Durham pitching mound meeting discussing retirement parties and lunch plans while their friends are being murdered via pencils a few feet away.
Union rules, one imagines.
I’ve had a Dad Bod since I was 12. I am not ashamed.
Don’t worry, being aware of bad guys having a smoke waiting for their turn to die is part of the experience, really. Looking forward to seeing Chapter 4. One of my favorite parts in previous installments was stabbing the guy in the chest with such precision he gives him a chance to live. At least they brought him back instead of throwing him in the fire like Santa’s magic bag.
Back one million years ago, when I actually did martial arts, my instructor once said in a fight between one skilled fighter and a random crowd of knuckleheads, the solo fighter has the advantage. I have no idea if this is true. At the peak of my martial arts prowess, I remained a random knucklehead.