Checked out John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. I actually thought the word parabellum was just a form of the word parabola… which seemed weird and made me think it would represent the flow of action in the film… like a parabola (starting quiet, rising to a peak, tailing off). HAH! I know nothing! I guess, if anything, it starts high, dips for a few minutes for conversations, and then goes right back up. And parabellum is just Latin for… well… you can look it up or just watch the movie (assuming you don’t already know the phrase).
Anyhoo… John Wick 3 continues the (flimsy/barely there) story of John Wick 2. Just a few minutes after the end of 2, in fact. Wick has been marked excommunicado by the mysterious High Table who controls the underworld… Wick has just twenty minutes to get patched up from the previous film’s wounds before he’s locked out of all assistance and wouldn’t be allowed back into the New York assassin hotel. From that point on, the plot goes: people hunt Wick, Wick kills people. Wick tries to find a way to survive this (beyond, you know, killin’ more people).
As with the previous two Wick films, the action is energetic, propulsive, creative, and borderline (or totally) comedic in its violence. It’s a lot of the same kind of gun-fu, kung-fu, knife-fu, horse-kick-fu, book-fu combat done in long takes (and no doubt some visual trickery) so you can track the action and actually get into it. Keanu Reeves is probably doing a lot of the action, though they are surely substituting stunt doubles without making it obvious. Halley Berry is also in the flick and has her own very impressive combat sequence… only now with armor-clad attack dogs (credit to the film; they make dog attacks look like the dogs are actually biting the humans, not just tugging on their pant legs).
The film continues the series’ love for its world-building. Where every city has a Continental hotel that caters to the underworld assassins. Where everyone knows each other and usually have cryptic history and professional respect. Where equally cryptic ancient coins and medallions with blood oaths are traded cryptically. Where everyone in every city seems to be a shadowy international assassin. All this window dressing barely matters to the movie but it’s fun they keep including it and building it up. Since this movie is only really concerned with its slick action, it’s nice to know they care.
Now, this isn’t a prefect movie. It runs 2hrs 10min (30 minutes longer than the first, ten minutes longer than the second) and the majority of it is constant fight scenes. The fight scenes are never poorly done, but at some point, I got tired of it and started to check out. The movie just goes a little too long and repetitive, low-stakes action. Wick is basically an unstoppable superhereo (or baba yaga)… he takes the hits but just shakes them off and keeps going. That’s half the fun… but a little goes a long way for me. Your result may vary.
But, despite that, this is still a pretty good action film that knows what it is and plays in that sandbox. The action scenes do one thing right at all times – they make sense and can be followed. It may fail in that the hero is unstoppable (lessening the suspense) but it’s hard to argue when that’s the point of the flick. If you never had any problems with the previous two flicks, then you won’t have a problem with this one.
Score: 81