John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (Review)

John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (2019)

What began as a sleek action film seemingly destined for low box office figures and cult status has expanded into one of the most original and innovative film series of the modern era. Drawing from the deep well of classic western and samurai film iconography, and wrapping bloody but elegant action sequences in a context of literary tragedy, the story of John Wick is a new incarnation of the tragic anti-heroes of the folk tales and fairy stories of old.

Not since Star Wars has a series of films invested in such original and intricate world-building and myth-making, creating a dreamlike fantasy world that looks like ours but behaves very differently. A dark, mirror universe that exists in the shadows of our own. A world in which all the people to whom you and I never give a second thought, people like the cab driver, the homeless man, and the street urchin, are all let in on the big secret. A world in which both lavish hotels and seedy bodegas are actually havens for the most ruthless assassins. Where the economy runs on mysterious gold coins bearing Latin inscriptions, where the criminal underworld is more organized than ours, and the lawless abide by a code of honor ruthlessly enforced by a governing body known as the High Table.

I think most people who have followed the films will, like myself, go into John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum expecting the conclusion of a trilogy. Instead, the film expands the world's mythology on an unprecedented scale. Parabellum pulls together all the disparate threads from the previous two films to weave a vast tapestry of assassins, their employers, and their targets. We glimpsed the extent of this mythology in John Wick: Chapter 2, when John goes off to Rome. But Parabellum takes us further, dealing with the history of both John Wick (Keanu Reeves) and the assassins themselves. We get to see where it all begins, where the assassins and their order first emerged, and we learn a bit about John's origins under the cold guidance of the Director (Anjelica Huston) along the way.

Many reviewers are quick to label the John Wick films as exercises in style over substance, as mindless action, or bloody art films. These profoundly miss the point. The world of these films is actually rich in lore, in history, in legends. The action sequences play out more like intricate dances, and it is no coincidence that John's mother figure is revealed to also run a ballet school. And though the films have built their reputation on these bloody, complex dances of death that threaten to seduce us through violence, we must always be mindful of the fact that it's the film's plot, the scenes in-between these action scenes, the connective tissue, that grounds the action scenes in their proper context. The plot reveals the movie's themes, which continue to take the form of mythic tragedy with each film.

Perhaps it is a fair criticism to say that these films suffer from a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too syndrome, trying to make profound and lofty assertions about the futility of violence while simultaneously reveling in the bloodshed. But it's also worth noting the the classic literary works the John Wick films evoke spend a shocking amount of time chronicling bloodshed. Consider The Iliad, which spends an inordinate amount of time detailing how certain soldiers were killed and by whom. Or the biblical stories of Israel's judges, which, among other accounts, includes the story in which Jael drives a tent peg through the skull of Sisera. Simply because a story contains a copious amount of bloodshed and violence is not necessarily license to write it off as mindless, but it's the context in which the violence happens that should determine whether we deem it acceptable. It is important that we begin to rescue how we interpret these things contextually. In The Iliad, men who die in battle are heralded as heroic figures because it is considered an honorable death. The book of Judges details the violence as God's judgment on the nations, yet it is Christ himself who will tell one of his disciples to "Put your sword back in place because all who take up a sword will perish by a sword" (Matt. 26:52). While violence on the page and on the screen certainly translate very differently, the point here is that violence can, when viewed in correct context, be both futile and nonetheless redemptive.

John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum probably understands this better than any other action film out there. Every last body that John leaves in his wake is simultaneously a moment of judgment enacted upon the story's villains, all of whom deal in death, and a futile attempt by John to outrun his past life. The film even understands that John himself cannot escape this inevitable fate. At one point, the beautiful and deadly Sofia (Halle Berry) blatantly tells him that one day, all this violence is going to catch up with him and he's going to die. At multiple points in the film, John is confronted with the question of why he keeps fighting, of why he keeps running, and his answer is actually quite profound: to keep the memory of his dead wife alive. Having known love once, and having encountered a deeper sense of happiness and bliss, he now seeks to live for the singular purpose of enjoying the memory, because of how it has changed him. And we see how this has moved him when John is given the task of killing an old friend by the Elder (Saïd Taghmaoui), who is the one man capable of giving John a new start by bringing him back into the fold of the assassins that now want him dead. Faced with ending the life of someone whom he cares about, a task that should have been so easy for an assassin of John's caliber, he cannot bring himself to do it. This, of course, invokes the wrath of the High Table, and John is back to fighting for his life once again, while the specter of Sofia's words linger on: one day it's all going to catch up with him, and one day it's going to get him killed.

The point of these movies could be ripped straight from Christ's words in Matthew. There is a sense in which John's endless fight is inevitable, because it is the life he chose. It echoes Winston's words in the first film, where he warns John against killing out of vengeance, because he might find himself dragged back into this world of death and dying. John's story can only really end one way.

The question is how many films it's going to take us to get there.