John Wick Should’ve Stopped At One

Among the thoughts I had early in John Wick 3 was to wonder how many white people are killed over the trilogy’s course. By which I mean how few. I should note that I started writing this post during the interminable Continental siege at the end which left me feeling well before it’s conclusion little more than hollow and impatient.

(Before proceeding, I should note that I tried to find out the answer to my wondering but didn’t have any luck.)

This really served only to reinforce that I found most of the film’s violent action to be some unfortunate combination of boring, cartoonish, and soul-deadening.

To be clear, I enjoyed the first movie for its comparative purity, if you can say such a thing. I didn’t particularly enjoy the second one because I found it repetitive and I simply didn’t care, but I very much did appreciate the expanded world-building. I’d hoped for even more of that in the third, but what little of it there was I didn’t find especially interesting or engaging.

I won’t argue that the trilogy isn’t well-made, because it is such, but I understood why the first one mattered as a story, and the second at least mattered for its greater sense of the larger world. I don’t really understand why the third one exists outside of the rationale of franchising. I watched this because absent some substantial obstacle of taste I’m something of a completionist in my pop culture consumption. That obstacle has been reached; I won’t be watching the fourth.

This was the first of a small set of movies I’m trying to get in before my month of HBO Max ends. Hopefully I’ll have more success with at least one of The Fallout, Kimi, Last Night in Soho, and Tenet.