chad stahelski went all the way out

This shit is next level. Too long with it being almost 3 hours, but yeah it rules.

Yes, it has a post-credits scene

Gonna see it again Thursday

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America from 9:00 on: https://youtu.be/GUwLCQU10KQ

Please tell me Donnie Yen wasn't in the comedy relief role that Mark Dacascos was in the prior Wick movie.

You mentioning it being three hours reminds me of how much the last fights from John Wick 3 felt like a drag as well.

Without spoiling too much, is the CGI in this noticeable?

The fact you mention this is next level and Donnie Yen being in this are some good enticing factors to go see this flick, as COVID averse as I am with crowds.

"Sean sparks like John Starks, nah, Sean ball like John Wall" - Rest In Power Forever Sean Price.

Like, there's shit in this where if down the line they decide to do a 5, it's gonna be hard to top. Honestly, they should just stop here.

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America from 9:00 on: https://youtu.be/GUwLCQU10KQ

from the last one since the ending fights soured what was an otherwise excellent action flick.

I'll stay out of this thread when the movie drops until I actually see it so I won't read any spoilers.

I hope this one has good usage of animal based stunts; the dogs attacking folks in tandem with Halle Berry from the last movie were top tier.

"Sean sparks like John Starks, nah, Sean ball like John Wall" - Rest In Power Forever Sean Price.

I can't think of any other action series that has FOUR well reviewed and well received movies.

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"The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in." - James Baldwin

I'm going back just for the last five minutes alone.

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America from 9:00 on: https://youtu.be/GUwLCQU10KQ

I thought the Die Hard trilogy* was the GOAT before they messed that all up with 4 and 5. John Wick came for the throne and took it.

*I still believe Die Harder is an underrated movie and a lot of fun.

Sadly, Len Wiseman (who made the fourth Die Hard) is doing the spin-off of this franchise, Ballerina. So, looks like my John Wick experience stops here.

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America from 9:00 on: https://youtu.be/GUwLCQU10KQ

DH5 does not exist! Lol

The third joint was not all that when it came out, and I think people only look back on it fondly cause Sam L went on to become this humongous star. And for my money, DH4 might have been the best one since the first one. And for a while the second one got shat on (unfairly imho).

Anyways, DH as a series has like 3 out of 5 good movies. What that third one is, is debatable.

Other than Wick, Bourne has four good movies, and they're all the ones with Matt Damon in them.

Taken bust it's nut waaaaay two early and gave us weak ass second and third rounds.

Bond has too many entries and that wack stretch of Lazenby to Moore where it was up and down and all over the place. Even the Brosnan joints were mostly eh outside the first two.
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"To Each His Reach"

but.....

Fuck aliens.

Everything else isnt in the same league. Only thing holding back Mission Impossible was number 2. But the last three and upcoming movies are absolute fire

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"The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in." - James Baldwin

I'll have to wait and see but I have MI at top right now and it still has 7 and 8 coming out soon. John Wicks are good but a little too similar for me, sort of in the Bourne lane but above those.

Not only is the action great, the movies themselves have some of the best sound work and HDR experience. They all shine. I crank up the dolby atmos at home to hear shots just ring out like call of duty. Just so dope.

because I loved his work outside of the John Wick franchises, but I wonder how future screenwriters will deal with Lance Reddick passing.

Not that this franchise is one for being grounded in reality, but I hope the future movies will honor the character somehow.

I could be wrong, but I vaguely remember reading this franchise was suppose to last at least five movies. This was well before Reddick had passed and I think I read it right before the third movie dropped, but I could very easily be wrong.

"Sean sparks like John Starks, nah, Sean ball like John Wall" - Rest In Power Forever Sean Price.

Just some monumental, sprawling, Greek epic poem level shit. Shades of Leone, Lean, De Palma, Keaton, Sammo Hung— I mean, they threw the kitchen sink at this motherfucker.

My audience applauded, cheered, laughed— got all the right responses. Gotta see this in theaters.

And it’ll likely rank right near the top of my favorite movies of 2023. Just very very very much My Shit in a huge way.

My movies: http://russellhainline.com
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So I guess I have to see it.

Honestly, I am a John Woo "Hard Boiled/Killer" person, so this should be my lane, but its hard for me to accept Keanu as anything other than a CGI construct.

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One Hundred.

Ian McShane must be a tiny man because LR was straight towering over him.

I wish they had put out that series about the Continental before this dropped, because all of the intricacies about the rules of the world are a lot to keep up with, going years between movies.

I dozed a few times (tired, not bored) so I'm guessing I missed the significance of "Tracker/Mr. Nobody" being in this at all, and why they had to steal Fat Bastard's toofus straight out of his mouth.

The "Hotline Miami" sequence in that building, and pretty much everything after the bounty got crunk was pure insanity.

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Twitter & IG: @rulerofmyself
SC: rulerofmyself17

Yes! She's on the drugs. (c) BoHagon

>why they had to steal Fat Bastard's toofus
>straight out of his mouth.



To get back into the family, the woman demanded John Wick bring proof that he killed the fat guy. the tooth = proof


edit: about the tracker being in the movie....uh...if a person is the type to believe whatever "mythology" or "order" a movie "makes Up" then I guess someone could find a theme-based "reason" why the tracker was included.

but...

to me, the movie was obviously going for a multi-racial thing and (with a movie that is going for the "kitchen sink" type of thing) it felt it had to include a (another) Black person in the movie some other way in a substantial way to give a "full" experience.

It was maybe, shit what did I say below...hell, I don't remember, so let me just say 3rd favorite action sequence even if I already said that about Osaka because the game player in me (I refuse to be a "gamer" thanks to comment section dweebs) loved seeing such an obvious homage get dumped like a bag of trash into my dumpster eyes. It was so casual yet vividly exactly that game, it didn't even register to me at first when he fired that shotgun that it was "that gun" action fans were raving about.


Actually and maybe because of the IMAX screen I was a little distracted by the fire effects, they looked a little ritzy. But I was immediately transported back to my crumby little early-20s life in 2012, trying to figure out how to conquer a game clearly designed for mouse/keyboard with a Playstation controller for hours and hours. To see that perspective and probably more importantly visceral feeling of bending an entire...the hell was it, hotel or something? complex to Wick's will conjured up some real dumb tingles in me.


Better yet, I could tell most of my audience didn't have the same reference point and still lost their minds.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

For some reason I was thinking the tracker was related to Charon in some way. Donnie Yen was a great anti hero of sorts. Almost forgot about the samurai's daughter till the post credit scene. I was like oh yeah lol.
I love how club scenes and night scenes are shot in the Wick series. I know the HDR will really pop at home and my home theater sound will be better than what I experienced in the actual theater. Looking forward to re-watching this over and over like I do the others.

Holy shit. I totally understand why some critics whittled this down to "Wick shoots guy, shoots other guy, punches some guy before he shoots him then shoots guy he punched plus guy neither he nor I had seen until he comes on screen to get shot" BUT


Somehow, and I really can't stress enough that I found the 3rd movie tiresome at times, AND I do think the first 15-30 minutes which is a LOT of time is a little confounding while Mr. Nobody never seems to justify himself as more than a stand in for all the stunt work for Halle Berry's character they clearly wanted to keep experimenting with...


SOMEHOW, shit...I'm not even sure what the "somehow" is. I had to apologize to the dude to my left multiple times for laughing so hard at this movie. Donnie FUCKING Yen plays a blind man whose cane is a central part of his martial art and his name is CAINE. Even better, it's all of two or less minutes before Yen-heads have no choice but to accept this is one of the most fun characters he's ever created.


And then there's the post-classical ronin aspect of the whole thing, the way this movie does so many interesting things with color and so many subtly beautiful blends of CGI and location shots, the brazen big-dickedness of knowing audiences are here to see some nutty action and therefore setting out to make sure that no matter how long the story beats are, the fight sequences are both longer and tell more of a story than the monologues and dialogues ever could.


Like, how fucking long is that Osaka Continental sequence? Give me any number from 15 minutes to 70 and I'll insist it felt like 5. And that's maybe, generously, home to the 3rd and 5th best fights in this beast. On a big brain level I get the stair sequence is the avatar for this entire post, but in the haze of pure hype it lost me for just a moment when John took the full Sispyhean tumble. On a rewatch, I'll definitely appreciate knowing the stuntman that took that fall is why that is as hard as it is, because he shocked the crew by going and going and going like a lost Freddy Got Fingered joke, but it was a little silly in the moment. I missed the smaller stakes of the first movie just a bit. A BIT.


Don't even get me started on all the visual homages to, what, all 100+ years of movies that are in this piece of shit movie? I couldn't help but feel like this was made for both popcorn nuts and true Letterboxd heads, from scene 1 to 100 or whatever an absolute sploosh of indulgence for action and "real movie" heads alike.


It was fascinatingly weird to see Tenet in a theater in 2020. I accidentally found myself seeing Top Gun Maverick on a Memorial Day Matinee and went nuts. But if I had to fire off some hot takes, which I don't, but I'll choose to...


John Wick 1 is about as perfect an ode to violence as an anecdote to grief as we'll ever see. It also just rips. But it's also plenty dumb, so it makes sense they made Chapter 2. The expansion of the world of assassination in that movie is pretty incredible, the other assassins make more sense as friends and/or villains than they did in the first, and they sacrifice a little simplicity to establish just how big John's world used to be. Chapter 3 is very cool, but also very messy, and honestly in many ways very forgettable. Don't get me wrong, it's SICK, but who really cares about the coins and vows, really?


Chapter 4 takes all three, distills them, ages them, stretches them out and relentlessly kicks their teeth in.


I just wish Mr. Nobody made any sense to me.


Edit: I feel like it's pretty apparent, but just in case: when I refer to this as a piece of shit movie, I mean that it makes me mad that it's as good as it is. The fights are the fights; it sucks that they're as amazing as they are because they just make me immediately pine for John Wick 5 to actually happen and Iko Uwais to be a major part of it. The story is the story, which again solves for Chapter 3's bloat while somehow justifying a much longer movie.


But maybe more than anything, this is just a gorgeous piece of trash. Sylvester Stallone is rolling in his grave over this thing. Did Ian McShane really need to walk past nearly a minute of eye shattering paintings to have whatever conversation about ethics he had with Pennywise? Maybe not, but he did.


And that wasn't nearly the swingingest dickiest shot. I hate this fucking movie.

~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz

I don;t know how long the others were.

But partway through, it started to feel like every minute of a nearly three hour run time.

This is mainly because of the action sequences, which were solid. But they're all the same, and with so many they began to bleed together for me.

I liked Caine and Nobdy, though the narrative for Nobody was a little weak. Loved the dog though.

I also loved the visuals, enjoyed the story, the way they brought Wick back into the fold, the ruse on the Marquis to finish it.

But the action sequences turned into a weakness for it. particularly when they decided to go with a second stair scene. Just scrap the first and do one with Caine, and I'm good. But doing two made it drag even more.

At any rate, this is arguably the GOAT action franchise. But this would have been better served with a few less, or more varied, "Wick Goes Wick" sequences. I did like the top down view on one in particular.

I've chosen to view John Wick as the ultimate live action video game, either played by an absolute expert, or with a game genie for unlimited power ups, health, etc.

It's the only explanation that makes sense to me.

I can accept the bullet proof uniforms, etc.

But this just plays, pardon the pun, like a video game. Right down to the Abobo Prime underboss, the allies, the constant head shots, the power ups (such as the flame thrower he gets in the top-down scene)

Wick is a character in a video game and we're watching some badass kid with no life kill that shit.

I'm sure this isn't a unique perspective, but it's the one that best fits we we see IMO