John Wick: Chapter 4

Essential, and the ending the series needed. At a hundred and sixty-nine minutes it is by a distance the longest, and the running time is the thing people argue about. The defence is that it is built as four feature-length set pieces in four cities rather than one escalating plot, and judged that way very little of it is slack.

Three sequences carry it. The Osaka hotel, where Hiroyuki Sanada and Donnie Yen fight on opposite sides of a friendship neither man wants to end. The overhead shot through a derelict Paris house lit by incendiary rounds, which is the most ambitious thing Stahelski has staged. And the two hundred and twenty-two steps below Sacré-Coeur, where Wick is thrown down the entire flight and has to climb them again, a joke about persistence that the film plays completely straight.

Donnie Yen is the best thing in it. Caine is blind, retired, and coerced into the job by a threat to his daughter, and he is considerably more charming than the protagonist. The film is honest enough to let him be the more sympathetic of the two. Bill Skarsgård plays the Marquis as a bureaucrat with a budget rather than a warlord, which is the right reading of what the High Table has turned into by now.

It works as a conclusion because the mythology finally pays for itself. Three films of rules and obligations exist so that Wick can use one of them, the formal duel, as the only legitimate way out available to him. Everything that was background in 2014 is load-bearing by the last scene, and the final image is a headstone. Watch it as the end.