This movie review brought to you by: random movies that happen to air on cable channels. I saw this one happened to be on tonight and I was vaguely curious and bored enough that I started to watch it about 1/3 of the way in. I am completely unfamiliar with the series aside from the title being something I'd heard of at some point in the past.
From what I can tell (and the brief summary shown in the channel guide), this is a movie about an assassin/hit man, John Wick. He did something, perhaps betrayed someone or his assassin cult/organization and now they want to kill him and his allies, while he is trying to escape being killed and kill his pursuers. Eventually in the movie, he makes a deal to spare his life and agrees to carry out the orders of the assassin cult/organization again, even though he had previously defected, and that's why they had now been trying to kill him. Essentially, he has to kill on their orders or they will kill him. Apparently there is some tragic backstory about his deceased wife, who I think was killed by the organization in retaliation for Wick's defection.
There are plenty of extensive fight scenes; in fact, the movie is almost one long continuous fight scene with brief pauses for plot advancement. The fight scenes are action-packed, highly (perhaps gratuitously) violent and rather unrealistic, even for an action movie. They did seem to focus on showing John Wick reloading his weapons regularly, which adds a touch of realism. However, these fight scenes were so extensive and over-the-top that they kind of just seemed like silly filler. I suppose the plot of the movie doesn't necessarily have much meat to it, so I guess they have to go overboard with the fight scenes. I get that no action movie will be totally realistic, but at least the Daniel Craig era Bond movies (and semi-counterpart Jason Bourne series) keep fight scenes to a scale that seems realistic enough for suspension of disbelief. I don't really mind violence in movies overall (I watch plenty of movies with darker, grimmer themes), but in this one it was just so excessive it did not add much.
John Wick doesn't really talk that much in the film. He says "Yeah" blankly enough times that it was notable. Keanu Reeves played John Wick. This movie did not really showcase the depth of his acting skills, whatever that might be. It doesn't have much merit in terms of substance.
The last part of the movie includes a long fight scene that takes place in a historic New York City hotel, the Continental. I assume this is a real place that actually exists. It would've been interesting to me if the architecture of this building had been showcased a bit more in the movie, but I get that wasn't the point of it. The scenes that occur in the hotel really aren't focused on the architecture at all, only the fighting and shooting. I was being too logical and disbelieving and was theoretically concerned about collateral damage to the interior of the hotel from all the gunshots. Imagine how much money and work it'd take to restore things after all that presumed damage. Anyways, I just looked it up and it is not a real place that exists. The exterior was filmed at one actual building and the interior shots were filmed in various different buildings to depict different parts of the fictional hotel. Additionally, some interior hotel scenes were shot on a set built in a studio.
Apparently this is the third movie in a series, so I assume there is useful context in the earlier two films that may have increased my understanding of this one. I'm not really sure what the point of the assassin cult/organization is and why it needs to exist -- are there really that many people that need to be assassinated?
Overall it was a strange movie and just not that impressive to me. In one scene, John Wick is forced to chop one of his fingers off, which is mildly gruesome to think about. It's also vaguely reminiscent of something that occurs in Stephen King's novel "Misery."
I had to look up the meaning of "parabellum" because at first I thought maybe it had something to do with a brain area, like a cerebellum. It is not a corresponding brain area; instead it comes from a Latin phrase. It is also the name of a type of ammunition or firearm, apparently.
