John Wick 4 is Good Fun

I finally got around to watching John Wick 4.

I hadn’t loved John Wick 3.
In JW3, Wick takes a lot of physical punishment and manages to keep fighting against all his enemies. What ruins the movie for me is scenes like where his enemies beat him, but they then don’t kill him; and so Wick is then able to keep fighting and kill them.

Fortunately, I enjoyed John Wick 4 much better.

Perhaps I went in with a more suitable mindset. – The films aren’t really good as a coherent “how would one super assassin survive against a horde of other assassins”.
Instead, I think films like JW4 are more like excuses for stringing a bunch of action scenes together that have all sorts of fantastic stunts.

e.g. Extraction 2 is directed by a stuntman.. its first third has an unbelievably impressive fight scene in an open courtyard during a prison riot.

In JW4.. does it make sense to have a fist fight in the middle of a busy street at night, in front of a muscle car that’s been turned on its side? No. Not one detail makes sense. (Traffic would stop, or the assassins would shoot Wick, or whatever). – But, it looks striking.

Does it make sense for assassins to have tacti-cool models of old firearms like the WW2-era’s Thompson gun, or the Wild West era’s lever action? No, but it follows rule-of-cool.

I reckon JW4 does a better job at integrating its ensemble of assassins and villains than the previous movies. The series has always had a set of heroes and villains.. but, I liked it in this one.
The fights are perhaps ‘accommodating’ for the sake of rule-of-cool.
One of the fun ideas that hasn’t been beaten to death is the idea of competing assassins protecting a target. – The anti-hero Mr Nobody in this movie wants to make lots of money off of killing John Wick, and so he kills the other assassins who are attacking Wick.

Plot wise… it’s so “rule of cool” that it’s as if it’s been perfectly rendered from the mind of a 12 year old.

I assume the series is going to continue.
I hope the next one is a bit more chilled out. The Fast and the Furious series is fun, but it’s a bit too over-the-top.