John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

With a plot about as sophisticated as a Spy Kids movie, film-sets that resemble the painted polystyrene walls of a laser tag night-out, and role-playing action of the sort you might see offered up by overzealous bachelor party paintballers or DnDers running around in capes or three-piece suits and elocuting words like "Parabellum" (say it as you swirl wine in a chalice), this tiresome third in the John Wick series dares to be even worse than the previous two cartoons: a Fanta-grade (thanks, Laurence Fishburne, for that punctuation) string of gun- and knife-fantasists' wet dreams with lethargic fight-scene choreography (we all love Keanu Reeves but think of the flat-footedness of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..) and compound this lethargy with the nerdy flamboyance of cape-twirling and gunplay to classical music, plus insistent we-want-this-series-to-go-forever universe-building and a troubling unerring nonchalance from everyone in the face of, well, endless face-knivings, plus - the worse thing - a dismaying promise of even more prepostrousness to come.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

John Wick (2014)

John Wick's two-hour gun and knife killing spree, including a brief scene featuring a yellow bus and an extended scene in a hotel called "The Continental", is justified because someone killed his dog and stole his car, but if the bus had "Columbine High School" written on it and if scenes in The Continental occurred on, say, the twelfth floor of a hotel in Las Vegas instead, the terrible indictment on America's gun culture that is not the intention of directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's ice-cold, low affect neo noir thriller, might dampen the dumb awe of fanboys who have driven demand for not just a number two but coming soon, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Even More Bullets To The Head.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS