IT WAS OK.

I find it hard to review these movies, which is probably why I didn’t review all the others haha. I dunno because I enjoy them but I can’t help feeling like I enjoy them ironically. Like I’m watching a school play version of an eighties action movie and it kind of resembles those movies but it’s a cartoonish self-referential post irony abomination.

And bare in mind I enjoyed this movie, but I can’t help think that if this came out in the eighties or early nineties people would laugh at it, it would be a blip. Rather than being something interesting with a unique spin on eighties/nineties action movies like The Guest or Upgrade (see these movies, they’re fucking awesome), it’s just a kind of an amalgam of that and a kung fu movie I guess where the weakest aspect is always the world building. The difference being those movies are usually set in the real world.

Whenever I’m watching a John Wick movie I have to take special care to ignore the stupid world building. Why the fuck wasn’t this movie just based in the real world? Why do you have to set it in this cartoony parody world where everyone and their nan is an assassin? It’s just totally immersion breaking and lame. It’s just fucking silly and makes the world kind of goofy and it takes away from a lot of the gore and violence because it just makes the whole thing a great big cartoon. I mean what’s so special about these magical coins and all this nonsense? What does it add to the non-plot?

I mean yeah these movies are meant to be dumb, there’s not a scrap of storyline you could cobble together from any of the films, the world building is weaker than in the Wanted movie where they get their assassination targets from a fucking sewing machine (which is less silly than the comic I might add). And it’s all set in motion by a dead doggo.

They’re less movies, than they are action set pieces strung together with light plot elements. And don’t get me wrong the action is awesome, the fight scenes and effects are masterful. Especially in regard to their use of physical and digital effects. They seem to use them seamlessly, where you have real squibs and then digital over the top for the more fucked stuff like stabbing people in the head. But it’s really just mindless violence without a plot holding it together.

So what’s this one about? Well John Wick has to survive or something, and I dunno Halle Berry is in it for some reason and she has lots of doggos and there’s like more really shit world building (ye-yaayy). Where he has to go see this ‘Elder’ who’s literally a guy that looks the same age if not younger than Keanu Reeves and do some stuff which he sort of doesn’t do and there’s another hook for a sequel. Which is fine, I’m glad they broke out of the trilogy bullshit. I was half convinced they’d do that stupid bullshit where it turns out someone killed his wife for reasons and tie it back to the first movie for a shitty conclusion.

I expected in this movie for John Wick to tear down the whole shitty house of cards world they’d built up which he doesn’t do but it makes me feel like they’re setting up for him to do that in the next movie and that makes it ok, I guess.

Again I enjoy John Wick movies, I just cringe everytime we have to cut to a room full of tatted grannies dressed like greasers working a switch board for assassins. So it’s like a world where everyone is an assassin, like surely we don’t need that many assassins? This is like anime logic, if everyone from the people who shine yours shoes to the people who make you sushi are assassins surely being an assassin is pretty mundane. It’s like someone who works as a waiter talking about his screenplay. “Oh yeah so I work here but my real dream is being the worlds top assassin, just waiting for my big break ya know.”

Every time I’m just like why? Why not just set it in the real world? It’s like trying to make it the matrix for assassins where it’s half in the real world and half in a shit anime and I’d almost like these to be a weird matrix spin off where neo and morpheus choose to re-enter the matrix as new people. Just remembering how bad those sequels were and retracting that statement.

And every fucking character he meets just imposes back story on him and is like “I’ll never forgive you for x thing that you did at y time, I’m really mad and you owe me or I owe or plot plot plot”. It’s tiresome, it’s like the movie is so aware how it has no story so it’s trying really hard to convince you to meme you into writing it in your head and you just can’t be bothered you just want him to shoot more people over a dog. So the John Wick universe could be amazing if only you could use your imagination and will it into being but you don’t because you’re shit and hollywood already stole all your imagination and sold it back to you as a snappy t-shirt.

It’s basically like the John Wick movies are a reboot to a once great franchise that doesn’t exist and expects you to make up in your head. So John Wick is basically skipping a phase, you’re supposed to make a series of popular movies before you make the shitty soulless cash grab reboot, this is just starting with the shitty reboot fanservice and expecting you to work backwards and think on fondly of a series of films that doesn’t exist in a genre that sort of doesn’t exist either anymore.

Because let’s face facts, action movies as a genre are pretty much dead, that’s why these movies are so popular because the only alternative are these neutered sterilised cucked capeshit movies where they can’t show blood and can only say ‘fuck’ once not in the context of actual fucking. And we get the odd throwback to when all big movies weren’t made exclusively to sell happy meal toys with Logan and to a lesser extent those garbage deadpool movies (yes they’re garbage, and if you like them your opinions are garbage and belong in a dustbin with all the other garbage, in fact why don’t you live in there with your garbage opinion?). But it’s not the same.

So again, I have to say I like these movies, I just have to add a caveat, you have to switch your brain off, you have to give this movie a pass on how fucking dumb it is, you have to watch it with beer goggles and just not notice the shit world and the stupid/non-existent plot.

These movies are like an exercise in learning to enjoy things. Just look at Keanu Reeves nice face and watch him brutally murder people because of a doggo and don’t think about it too much. CONSUME PRODUCT, GET EXCITED FOR NEXT PRODUCT.

Of course I’ll watch the next one predictably, but only because I like Keanu Reeves and it would make him sad if I didn’t. (Which is also why I’m going to watch the new Bill and Ted movie and force myself to like it, if it actually can meme itself into existence.)