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.

Baba Yaga: John Wick as Dark Fairy Tale

John Wick (2014)

Young, arrogant Russian gangster Iosef Tarasov breaks into the home of a grieving widower, kills the man's dog, and steals the man's car. Iosef proudly returns to his father, Viggo, the head of the Tarasov crime family, only to have his father berate him for his actions. In a state of shock and disbelief, Iosef listens as his father spins for him the dark fairy tale of "Baba Yaga," a mythical creature worse than the boogeyman. And to his horror, Iosef learns that the grieving widower is John Wick, a highly trained former assassin who was known throughout the criminal underworld as the Baba Yaga, the one person you could send to kill the boogeyman. This is the man that Iosef has offended. This is the man who now comes for him.

This is the inciting incident of 2014's John Wick, a violent and beautifully shot film that caught the imaginations of viewers and critics alike and gave us our first glimpse into the dark, neon-noir phantasmagoria world inhabited by criminals and the assassins they employ. When we first meet the titular protagonist, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has left the shadowy world of assassins behind to settle down with his beautiful wife, Helen (Bridget Moynahan). But Helen's unexpected death disrupts that peaceful existence. Before she dies, she buys John a puppy named Daisy, and leaves him a note telling him that he still needs "someone, something to love." John comes to love Daisy, his wife's final act of kindness to him before her passing. And life goes on...right up until the moment Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), believing John to be just another "nobody," breaks into John's home, kills Daisy, and steals John's beloved '69 Mustang.

Out for revenge, John carves a bloody trail through the criminal underworld in his pursuit of Iosef. But every action has consequences, as his old friend Winston (Ian McShane) warns him. "Have you thought this through?" Winston asks him. "I mean chewed it down to the bone? You got out once. You dip so much as a pinky back into this pond, you may well find something reaches out, and drags you back into its depths." This warning becomes the propulsive force that drives the overarching narrative of the film series. What begins as a mission for revenge becomes a fight for survival, as the consequences of John's return to the world he left behind continue to pile up, bringing him into contact with a plethora of menacing figures like Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) and Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), each one worse and more monstrous than the one before.

John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

There are many valid ways of looking at the story of John Wick. Brutal revenge tale, stylish action flick, bloody art film. But perhaps the most profound reading of the films is one that sees the overarching story as a dark, modern fairy tale. Consider first the character of John Wick. He is, in his most essential form, the archetype of the anti-hero. As an assassin with a dark past, he is akin to the tortured Byronic heroes of classic literature. He is a mythic figure caught up in an epic tale of revenge. Then there are the overt references to Greek myths throughout the story. His wife's name is Helen, who, in Greek mythology, was the most beautiful woman in the world, and whose abduction sparked the beginning of the Trojan War. The criminal underworld John returns to maintains an intricate structure that runs on fundamental rules that everyone understands and abide. The Continental is a hotel that acts as a neutral ground for all the assassins. Entry to the hotel is monitored by a concierge named Charon (Lance Reddick), and gained only through the paying of gold coins. The suits the assassins wear are treated like armor, their guns like swords. John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) even locates a portion of the story in Rome, one of the world's most ancient and important historical cities.

The John Wick film series is known for its practical effects and high-octane action, but perhaps the most significant contribution of these unique movies has nothing to do with glamorized combat, and everything to do with how the films choose to tell their story. There are literally hundreds of revenge-driven action movies out there, but the black-clad character of John Wick, a modern day black knight, has captured the popular imagination in ways that dozens of other lesser characters have failed to do. This is because the John Wick films are not merely brilliantly-choreographed action sequences; rather, they fill a void that the popular imagination has yet to realize has been lost: that of the dark fairy tale. Each film stands alone as a kind of dark fable about a man who set out searching for revenge, only to have lost his way and now must continue to run in order to survive.

The world-building in these movies is subtle and nothing short of brilliant. These films break every rule in terms of what the modern Hollywood machine tells us should be popular nowadays. There's no "cinematic universe" here. Instead, the secrets to John Wick's world are piecemealed out a little at a time, in a line of dialogue here or a quick shot of a happening there. The films are set in a neon-tinted reality so much like our own, but there is an order to the darkness, a reason to the chaos of the criminal underworld. They exist in an almost dreamlike fantasy world that mirrors our own. In fact, the first film could very easily have begun with the words, "Once upon a time" flashing across the screen, and we would continue to respond to these films in the same way. And each movie ends with a shot of the bloodied man and his dog walking away, continuing their endless trek through the darkness as John learns and relearns the lesson contained within Winston's initial warning: every action has consequences.

John Wick deals in catharsis. We come to these movies in the same way we come to the Byronic heroes of literature, in the same way we come to the black knights of old. We come to see these lonely, wandering anti-heroes do battle with old gods and monsters, trying to keep their internal darkness at bay by fighting against the external darkness with all their might. We resonate with John Wick because we all have something we're running from and continue to run from, and we fight all of our battles telling ourselves this will be our last, having to learn and relearn that every action has consequences. We turn to these heroes and these stories because on a fundamental level, we all intuit that, if we're not careful, the darkness can swallow us through wrong choices, no matter how noble our initial motivations. These stories allow us to breach the darkness and find the worst parts of ourselves there, to navigate the underworld, to sift through the dirty glass that is the dark underbelly of the human spirit. The John Wick films work as that dark, modern fairy tale haunting the popular imagination. They tap into the darkest parts of wonder and fear to issue a warning: every action has consequences. To so much as flirt with the darkness is to be dragged back into its depths. And to be dragged back in is to doom us to forever run, mistakenly thinking that the next battle we fight yields that moment of catharsis, of release, of deliverance from the darkness once and for all. This is what sin does to us, the life sin beckons us to live. A life forever on the run. How do you think John's story ends? He can never settle down again. He can never be content. We can't run our way out of sin and into deliverance.

The darkest of fairy tales offer this bleak truth: that we can't clean up our own mess, someone has to come in and do it for us. And when that mess is the human heart...well, to clean that up requires an act of God. We, like John, are haunted by an image of beauty—that great and good external thing that does not well up from within, but comes breaking in from without.

For John Wick, beauty wears the face of Helen, the woman who died and now haunts him. For us, beauty wears the face of a man who died and rose again, and now haunts the world.