'John Wick: Chapter 4' Is A Videogame. Get Used To It
#219: "John Wick: Chapter 4," "Spin Me Round," "The Devil's Advocate," "Adventureland"
Edition 219:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
This week: Why movies like John Wick are the likely successor to the superhero behemoth. Then, a couple overlooked comedies you might like, and one outrageous drama starring Al Pacino as Satan. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Wes Anderson gives us his first look at his new movie, and it’s awesome.
John Wick: Chapter 4
If the proverbial bloom is coming off the rose of the superhero genre — a big if, but one I welcome with open arms — then by now we can safely say the most likely successor will be videogames. We’re already seeing it. “The Last of Us” was a phenomenon; Dungeons & Dragons is about to be a blockbuster this weekend; The Super Mario Bros. Movie is coming later this year.
Despite all of that, I’ve never seen a more videogame-y movie than John Wick: Chapter 4. Which isn’t based on a videogame, obviously. What I’m getting at is that videogame-y-ness, if you’ll forgive my Frankenstein word creation, has started to permeate filmmaking as a whole.
You’ll never find a movie more obsessed with gear, for example. In most action movies a gun is a gun is a gun, but here there’s a persistent need to level up one’s guns, ammo, and bulletproof suits. By sequel No. 4, every character is so leveled up that each kill seemingly requires several bullets, karate chops, punches to the face and a choke-out to finish them off.
John Wick is the rare franchise that gained in popularity as it expanded its world and lore. There’s “the high table,” the Continental hotels, the markers, and the unbreakable rules. Every aspect of the movie is heightened to the absolute maximum. Each casual conversation must be held beneath the Eiffel Tower, or in front of a gigantic renaissance painting.
It’s videogame logic, really. Each assassin group is its own distinct faction, with almost hilariously clear archetypes based on various religious and cultural orthodoxy. The Japanese ninjas, the French bourgeoisie, the German orthodox church gangsters, the African desert marauders, the NYC homeless kingdom. Choose your team, choose your costume, choose your hero.
Our avatar, Mr. Wick, is a mostly wordless and mostly personality-less blank canvas, a classic videogame hero. He moves through the world as an invincible killing machine — 299 on-screen kills in the first three movies alone. Here he gets thrown off a building, and down several flights of stairs, but as long as he has enough time to allow his health bar to regenerate he’s right back into the action at full speed.
Much like a videogame, we come for the action. The rest is just window dressing. Even though we cannot control our avatar in this movie, director Chad Stahelski’s filmmaking style puts viewers over the shoulder, in unbroken close-ups, and at one triumphant moment even completely overhead looking straight down on Wick as he moves between rooms of a building blasting bad guys with a fire shotgun (it’s one of the most breath-taking action sequences of all time, but it’s also very similar to an iPhone survival game).
None of this is to discredit the movie, which succeeds firstly because its action is once again incredible and also because it has such a firm grasp of what the story is and is not.
Philosophically, I should be opposed to this kind of movie. I am and will always be a storytelling guy, while most action movie plots are constructed around pre-arranged stunts (Stahelski and Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie have both said this publicly). But a movie like this plays to more primal instincts, I guess, which overpower the logic in one’s mind. John Wick: Chapter 4 is just really, really cool.
I’m not the only one that thinks so. Despite content that might lead one to assume wouldn’t appeal to women or kids, the movie has raced past $150 million globally in its first week. Hey, what can we say, violent videogames are incredibly popular.
That’s a big fat hit, but it’s important to note the economies of scale for the sake of context. The most recent Doctor Strange and Ant-Man movies were not well received in the “zeitgeist,” whatever that means, but their relative disappointments still made $955 million and $460 million respectively. There’s buzzy, and then there’s bottom line.
When Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 drops the first weekend of May, this will likely be a moot point. Superheroes are still the thing keeping the theatrical movie business afloat.
For now.
But if comic book IP and comic book sensibilities have shaped the last 10-15 years in blockbuster entertainment (and totally inspired our current multiverse craze), it’s quite possible that videogame logic will rule the day for the next decade-plus.
Yay?
Something New
Spin Me Round (Hulu): In my yearly movie diet, I budget in at least 10-15 truly awful comedies, most of them rom-coms. They’re cheesy and predictable, for sure, but for the most part I’d still say they’re way better comfort food than “Friends” reruns or whatever trash reality show you’re currently watching to unwind. Especially because one or two per year turn out to be better than they have any right to be.
That’s Spin Me Round, the third collaboration between writer/director Jeff Baena and writer/star Allison Brie (The Little Hours, Horse Girl). One cannot help but wonder whether the truly basic, almost-hacky premise — a chain restaurant manager wins a trip to a leadership training seminar at the company’s HQ in Italy — was a brilliant strategy to trick a cast full of talented actors into taking paid vacations. The movie is carried by, in addition to Brie, the likes of Aubrey Plaza, Molly Shannon, Zach Woods, Tim Heidecker, Fred Armisen, Lil Rel Howery and Alessandro Nivola, all playing roles that otherwise would seem beneath their levels of comedic greatness (another plausible explanation: the sheer lack of good comedy movies).
The central mystery plot here of something being not-quite-right about the trip is a convenient excuse to spend more time with the larger-than-life characters, each of whom tries to outdo each other with ridiculousness without tipping the entire thing into slapstick territory. The movie is above average, at best, but within this genre of trash comedy that feels like a home run.
Something Old
The Devil’s Advocate (1997, Tubi): The career of Keanu Reeves is by now very long and incredibly varied (both in genre and in quality, if we’re being honest). He will forever be known for The Matrix and John Wick, and to me never got better than he was in Speed, but if you haven’t seen this absolutely insane late-90s drama, I wanted to bring it to your attention.
In the 90s, people were simply obsessed with lawyers, both at the book store (back when that mattered) with authors like John Grisham, and at the box office with hits like A Few Good Men, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, A Time To Kill, The Rainmaker and more. None of them had as succinct and effective of a story premise as this — he’s Satan’s lawyer. Woah. The titular “he” is Reeves, the devil is an absolutely unhinged Al Pacino and the wife is a young Charlize Theron. Triple woah.
The movie isn’t great, by any objective measure, but it’s infinitely watchable both as fodder for quotable jokes (“free will…it is a b****!” says Pacino at one point) and as straightforward drama created with the earnest competence the decade was known for.
Something to Stream
Adventureland (Showtime): I remember watching this movie about sad loser post-grads when I was a sad loser post-grad and feeling ashamed of how much I liked (loved?) it. It felt insignificant at best, a relic of a time before its then-unknown cast went on to bigger and better things: Jessie Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, Martin Starr, Kristen Wiig, and Bill Hader.
Eisenberg’s fancy college degree gets him as far as a summer job at a carnival, where he meets the rest of the gang and they…well they don’t do anything. That’s kind of the point. It wasn’t until this week when “The Rewatchables” podcast validated my opinion that this movie is a lost 2000s comedy classic. It’s not as outrageously funny as writer/director Greg Mottola’s better known Superbad, but it’s dry and subtle humor still hits, to go with the kind of burned out apathy and tragedy that can resonate with the sad loser post-grad who lives in all of us.
The Godfather Part II (Peacock): My good friend and this newsletter’s Bad Movie Correspondent Justin Birnbaum hosts a movie podcast where he screens movies his roommate has never seen. I’ve recommended this podcast in the past, but I’m mentioning it again here to announce I can no longer endorse the show and in fact have suggested that he shut it down entirely out of shame, after having the nerve, the chutzpah!, to come out publicly and call The Godfather Part II, objectively one of the greatest films ever made, not just “overrated” but flat out bad. They should be ashamed.
Trailer Watch: Asteroid City
The first trailer for any Wes Anderson movie is like a warm hug from a loved one. It’s so familiar, so specific, and so guaranteed to make you smile. The colors, the production design, and the overall sensibility could not possibly belong to anyone else. All the usual Wes actors are here — Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum (surprisingly no Wilson brothers!) — plus we get some very famous additions: Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Steve Carrell, Maya Hawke.
This trailer doesn’t really explain what this movie is about and to be honest, I don’t really care. This movie is going to be awesome and I can’t wait for it.