John Wick: Chapter 4 review – This movie has some great fight sequences, writes BRIAN VINER

John Wick: Chapter 4 (15,169 minutes)

Verdict: Overly long

Qualification ***

Infinity pool (18, 117 minutes)

Verdict: excessively scary

Qualification ***

There have been medium wars with fewer death tolls than this latest installment of the murderous life of John Wick, played as always by Keanu Reeves with an uncompromising scowl and mostly monosyllabic words.

The average life of an extra in John Wick: Chapter 4 cannot be more than five seconds, from first appearance to termination by bullet, knife, or collision with a hard surface.

The corollary to this, as always, is the indestructibility of Wick himself. He is the Rasputin of the action genre, repelling assassination attempts like you or I might fend off blow flies.

Of course, our laconic, straight-haired hero has been doing this since the first movie in the series, way back in 2014, when he came out of retirement because someone killed his puppy.

Before that, you remember, he had been the world’s greatest murderer. Helpfully, now that he’s in the business of avoiding rather than delivering, he’s still the best in the world.

The alarming speed with which he is hit by speeding cars, and indeed hits the ground after jumping through the sixth floor windows, is never enough to leave him with more than a temporary limp.

As for the plot, which takes us from New York to Paris via Osaka and Berlin, we don’t need to stop. Mind you, I sometimes wonder if the John Wick writers regret calling their shadowy organization of baddies ‘the High Table’.

Ian Fleming knew what he was doing when he chose SPECTER. But High Table simply isn’t enough, especially when abbreviated to ‘the Table’.

If only Wick could laugh, which he hasn’t since the harrowing puppy affair, it would surely tickle him to know that the Bureau has dealt him an $18 million hit.

Regardless, the President of the Table is an aristocratic French dandy, the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), whose strategy for dispatching Wick risks landing on several stools.

Among those heavily invested in our hero’s fate in this ambitious hybrid of action movie and IKEA store are an African-American mercenary (Shamier Anderson) with a menacing dog, a resourceful Japanese hotelier (Hiroyuki Sanada), a gamer of Goldtooth (Scott Adkins) and a blind but brilliant swordsman named Caine (splendidly played by Hong Kong martial arts star Donnie Yen).

Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne and the late Lance Reddick, in their last screen role, reprise their characters from the previous films, providing gravitas by thimble. That’s the right measure, because this movie can’t afford to take itself too seriously.

He also can’t afford a runtime of more than two and a half hours, but director Chad Stahelski evidently couldn’t resist. The result is excessive in more ways than one. All of that said, there are some extraordinary fight sequences, leavened with appreciable ingenuity. I loved a scene from the Arc de Triomphe that puts a considerable twist on the everyday difficulty of crossing the street in Paris, and Stahelski pays his own unique way of homage to the great comedy stars of the silent era by making them Wick struggled to break through. the 222 steps of the Sacre-Coeur basilica only, repeatedly, fall down again.

Even within such a violent context, it’s a great slapstick. Buster Keaton, I imagine, would have removed his pork pie hat out of respect.

In terms of new releases, it’s quite a week for the Skarsgard family. Bill not only plays John Wicks’ nemesis, but his brother Alexander is the star of Infinity Pool, a psychological horror-thriller that seems to be very good, only to become woefully overwrought in the final third.

Skarsgard stars as James Foster, a novelist staying at a five-star resort on an otherwise poverty-stricken Indian Ocean island whose glamorous lifestyle belies his lack of professional success.

In fact, the money comes from his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), heiress to a publishing fortune.

They are beautiful, decadent and boring. She has come to the hotel looking for ‘inspiration’ for his second unwritten novel.

Then he meets a charismatic young Englishwoman, Gabi (Mia Goth), and her Swiss husband Alban (Jalil Lespert). Claiming to have recognized James and loved her book, Gabi makes no secret of her attraction to him, which leads to a decidedly graphic sexual act when the two couples recklessly leave the resort for a day on a remote beach.

That night, James takes them all back to the hotel, but on the way he hits and kills an islander. He is duly arrested and told that, according to local laws, he faces execution, which is to be administered by the sons of the man he has killed. But there is a way out.

As part of a new ‘tourist initiative’, he is able to pay the police to clone him, so that his doppelganger can be executed in his place.

Up to this point, the story is a disturbing but rather brilliant satire on the pampered rich, not unlike the recent movies Triangle Of Sadness and The Menu, and the wonderful TV drama White Lotus.

But from then on, director Brandon Cronenberg, ramping up the body horror imagery and sexual themes so dear to his father David Cronenberg (who made 1996’s critically acclaimed film Crash), goes wildly overboard, so that in the end he doesn’t it’s just about their hideous characters. who have bitten off more than they can chew.

Give this beast of suspense 2 hours of your time.

The beasts

Qualification ****

For anyone who craves brevity in cinematic storytelling, it’s not a good week. John Wick: Chapter 4 and Infinity Pool (both reviewed above) are much longer than they should be, and The Beasts, a part-Spanish, part-French suspense thriller, weighs in at two hours and 17 minutes. However, it is well worth the investment of time.

It stars Denis Menochet, the French actor best known to English-speaking audiences for playing the farmer who at the beginning of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, with a Jewish family hiding in his basement, is chillingly played by the SS officer of Christoph Waltz. Here he is once again a farmer subjected to intimidation tactics, but this time they are much cruder.

Menochet plays Antoine, a wealthy Frenchman who with his wife Olga (Marina Fois) has moved to northern Spain to fulfill their dream of having an organic farm.

But a pair of cunning local brothers, Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido), take on them, especially when the ‘French’ oppose plans for a lucrative wind farm.

At first his antipathy seems like nasty but essentially harmless provincial xenophobia. But with great skill, director Rodrigo Sorogoyen, in addition to incorporating family and gender themes, turns it into something much darker. (In theaters and at Curzon Home Cinema.)