John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

Essential on continuity alone. It opens with the clock still running from the last shot of Chapter 2 and closes on a cliffhanger that Chapter 4 begins by resolving, so there is no version of this series where you skip it and follow what happens next.

The first forty minutes are the best in the franchise. Wick runs through a rainy New York with every professional in the city watching the same clock, improvises first with a library book and then with whatever is bolted to the walls of an antiques dealer's shop, and the knife-throwing sequence is the purest this series has ever been about geography and consequence. The horse is ridiculous and it works.

Then the lore takes over. An Adjudicator arrives to audit the institution, Wick goes to Casablanca, then to a desert, then into a negotiation with an Elder about what he is willing to give up, and the film slows down to accommodate an organisation chart. Halle Berry's dogs are a genuinely strong sequence and Sofia is the most interesting character the series has added; the mythology built around her is not. This is the point where background detail stops being texture and becomes the plot, and viewers who cooled on the series generally cooled here.

One practical note. The ending leaves Wick alive but owned, thrown from the Continental roof by Winston and recovered in a basement by the Bowery King. It reads as a setup rather than a conclusion because it is one, and watching it without Chapter 4 to hand is unsatisfying in a way the first two films never are.