John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Keanu Reeves’ John Wick returns in this uneven and hopelessly overlong installment, with the narrative following the seemingly unstoppable character as he attempts to evade assassination after a $14 million bounty is placed on his head. Filmmaker Chad Stahelski, working from Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins, and Marc Abrams’ screenplay, does an astounding job of immediately luring the viewer into the deliberately-paced proceedings, as John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum boasts an opening stretch containing two of the series’ very best (and most exciting) fight sequences. (Reeves’ protagonist takes on an enormous adversary and then engages in a knife battle with several well-trained opponents.) It’s disappointing to note, then, that the picture segues into a palpably padded-out midsection that highlights the series’ questionable mythology to a frequently oppressive degree, with the less-than-effective nature of this stretch compounded by an almost total absence of compelling, engrossing action sequences. (A mid-movie stop in Morocco, where Wick meets and fights alongside Halle Berry’s Sofia, is decent but hardly the best this franchise has to offer.) The progressively uninvolving atmosphere ensures that the picture’s worn out its welcome long before it reaches its violent climax (ie it’s hard to actually care by that point), and it’s ultimately fairly apparent that John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum would’ve benefitted from serious streamlining somewhere along the line.

** out of ****