John Wick Is White Trash Masquerading As  Black Spleen

John Wick Chapter 4(in cinemas)

Rating:  ½ star

There is  something terribly  trashy about the  fourth chapter of the  John Wick saga. Trashy and  self-obsessed , it is the action avatar  of  Doordarshan’s Chitrahaar which played uninterrupted song sequences  from Hindi films for 30 minutes  and was great  fun to watch.

  John Wick 4, is  nothing but  a jamboree  of  fusion stunts(martial arts, taekwondo, wrestling, free-hand  boxing) beaded together  in a hot steamy bloodbath , punctuated by bouts  of conversation where  self-important  men in suits  and  tuxedos seem to be  saying something important about mortality , when in fact they are nothing but a bunch of unschooled power-drunk   goons in clothes robbed  from boutiques  who never went to finishing school because they always thought  they knew what it went: school that teach  you to finish  off  your adversaries.

And trust me,  they are  bad at  it : these  guys who kill without counting , fire at Mr Wick(so called because I  presume he never burns out even when the oil is dried up)pointbank and miss him each time.  If the same happened in a Bollywood film we’d say it is  asinine. Here the audience feels  it is ‘surreal’  when in reality it is  nothing of  the  sort.

Screenwriters  Shay Hatten and Michael Finch seem to have written  purely by numbers. The headcount is  so high  and so senseless,you wonder, is this killing spree actually entertaining global audiences? Or are they responding reflexively  to  the gruesome cheerless stimuli?

For a franchise   entertainer John Wick Chapter  4 is  inexplicably humourless,unless you think a trained homicidal  dog peeing on his victim after  killing it , is  funny(audiences around me were laughing, probably to  hide their embarrassment).

In one sequence  shot on the never-ending steps  of  a  serpentine  park , John(dear dear John) rolls down from the top right to  the bottom….thud thud thud thud….Maybe a few thuds less would have  reduced the excruciatingly lengthy playing time.

Watching  assassins of various races slitting throats and dodging bullets for three hours can  prove less  than entertaining  unless you are a sucker for grievous self-injury.In one  sequence, the interesting Swedish actor Bill Skarsgad—we could say he is the Swedish after the main very very coarse course—plunges  a knife into  poor Shamier Anderson’s  hand and  gives him two options: either pull  the knife out or  drag your hand out of the knife .The first option is supposed to prove that Shamier playing a killer  poetically named Tracker with a killer dog, cares  only for himself, the second option proves he  cares for the larger cause….to  get John Wick.

 Just why  it is  so difficult for such super-skilled assassins to  do something as elementary as kill John Wick and put humanity  out of misery , is  unclear to me. I am ready to pay any amount to anyone who can explain why Wick is so slippery  to his  purported assassins, why Keanu Reeves  looks like  a  tarot card  reader in an invisible tent all through ,and most important of all, why the series needed Chapter  4 when 3 was more than enough, thank you.

 No amount of  sanguinary excesses  on the streets of Paris can  quench the growing feeling that  this film has  nothing to say. The characters should have just kept quiet and let all the mutilating action  do all the talking.

 There are two types  of  actors  in John Wick Chapter 2: the seasoned troupers(Ian McShane  for instance,who seems  to have  gotten  himself a  new set of teeth since  we last saw him) who try hard to look like  bad actors,and others who  don’t try at all.

Donnie Yen  plays  a blind assassin who can shoot  straight at his  victims . Even he misses Mr Wick each time.Immortality in a pit of excreta.