Review of John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019) by Stream2Bigscree — 28 Jan 2020

Did Baba Yaga hit the mark?

Keanu Reeves stars in his third iteration of many’s favorite movie hitman, John Wick. It feels like a long time coming for this movie but the franchise picks up as if they never left us. The only person who left us in this series was Michael Nyqvist, who as signature villain in the first John Wick movie. There is a nice tribute to him in the credits after the movie.

But now it’s time to take a shot at Baba Yaga.

YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE WATCHING THIS MOVIE. John Wick does two things very well: kill assassins and get the mess beat out of him. In this movie, those are two of the three things worth watching. The third thing worth watching is Halle Berry and her canine bodyguards. We know what we are going to get from John in this movie but for about 10 minutes, Halle’s bodyguards steal the movie. Halle did a really great job, surprisingly, looking natural with the fight choreography and gun play in the movie. Other than that, there are some good one liners that fans will understand from the first two movies. This movie has a strong beginning and I want to shout out my NBA fans. All I’ll say is, “Boban!”.

NOW for the main course… the bad parts. THIS MOVIE HAS VERY LITTLE PLOT, DIALOGUE AND PLOT DEVELOPMENT. That makes the 2-hr movie quite rough to get through, even when you don’t expect much in the plot realm anyway. This movie is two hours of almost non-stop fighting, shooting and gruesome killing. That’s better than watching Keanu struggle to run for 2 hours, in hindsight (i.e. Tom Cruise in any Mission Impossible movie). This movie is easily 30 minutes too long. Most of that 30 minutes is solid fight scenes; however, they use the same grappling and jiu-jitsu moves in every single sequence throughout the movie for Keanu, Halle and in the previous movies. Therefore, the fighting gets old, especially in this movie, which had a very strong first 45 minutes.

After that, they gave us a couple of laughs in this movie but they made the main villain and his lackeys too big of a joke. At first, the joke was funny but it wore out its welcome and they just kept hammering it home (similar to a Euron situation for my GoT fans). On top of that, the villains weren’t even really trying to kill John towards the end, anyway. The director was like, “hey everyone just slap fight with John. We’ll keep the tape rolling until we run out”. It became hard to watch towards the end and I just wanted the movie to end. Not to mention, the other villain in the movie no one even tried to kill and you want her to die the most!

Long story short, if you are a John Wick series fan, you have to see this but I’d suggest getting the cheapest price possible. Maybe save your money for John Wick 4, which is certain to happen and in hopes of a better movie. For the general fan, watch the the first John Wick and then decide if you want to keep watching in a matinee or rent/stream capacity only in the months to come.