Largely sums up my experience of watching it (although Chris my offer was actually intended as a text chat, I also wouldn't want to talk through a film, plus most of what you heard from me would also have been explosive laughter)!Raid wrote: ↑Sat Oct 14, 2023 9:25 pmJohn Wick: Chapter 4
I think this may actually be my favourite ever piece of action cinema, finally replacing Fury Road. It's stunning. Snowy offered to watch it together over voice chat, and I declined as I don't tend to watch films with chatter, but all he'd have heard was riotous laughter from my side. The choreography doesn't once drop below the level of "staggeringly good" - even just the amount of effort they put into the double-tap kill-confirming is astonishing. It has the grace of Crouching Tiger with the precision of, well, any Jackie Chan film. It's really quite astonishingly good.
I had my niggles, but they are almost irrelevantly minor. The whole concept is utterly batshit loopy and in each film they layer on more and more craziness. Every now and again my brain would rail at it until I told it to be quiet. The armies of identically dressed enemies made it feel like a video game (as did the awesome sequence with the Dragons Breath shotgun filmed from above - very Hotline Miami). Traffic looping off the Champs-Élysées and around the Arc de Triomphe at what looked like about 90mph. The folks in the nightclub continuing to dance while John and pals engage in close-range shootery and axe-swinging right next to them. The complete lack of any rozzers in any of the locations despite extended gunfights and car chases. The layering of more and yet more customs, rules etc stemming from the High Table. All completely off the charts nuts. I messaged Chris while watching to say I wished that it actually had a coherent storyline, that it felt a bit like a Manga film (which I have always struggled with storytelling-wise) but having watched the whole thing it did actually work for me.
The choreography of it all was incredible too. That they can make a 3 hour long action movie with that many close-up fight scenes, all perfectly shot, without it ever getting tedious must have taken so much time and ability it boggles the mind.
Laughed my arse off all the way through, and am now contemplating a 1-4 playthrough.