This is actually my favorite of the Johns Wick. I feel like this is kind of indefensible, given that a) I was annoyed at the absurdly baroque world-building of the second one, and b) this one quadruples down on that element, but… I don’t know, I think it ended up going so far over the top that it just kind of shifted into a different genre?

Like, with the second one, I was still thinking of it as a “gritty underworld” kind of action movie. Okay, yes, it had some unrealistic elements, but fundamentally I figured was set in our world; and so I was annoyed at how much it wasn’t that.

But this one, my expectations were already that it was going to be absurd, and then they really super went hard at the underpinnings of this fantastickal secret history occult underworld universe, such that it started to seem like a category error to complain about it being unrealistic. Like, figuring out how 45,000 assassins make an actual living is about as off-point as complaining about how Sauron kept all those orcs fed with no agriculture. It’s just not what the thing is doing.

(I suspect this actually means I would like the second one better, if I watched it again knowing what I was getting into from the start, tbh.)

And so taken as a baroque dark fantasy movie about an ancient order of mystical assassins, this is… good? You get some interesting character interplay, you get hints of a backstory for John Wick, you get balletic (sometimes literally) ultraviolence, but mostly what you get is a movie that is just so fucking stylish it hurts.

Like, it’s a movie where before the big fight scene, one of the characters is careful to turn on the neon lights in his hall of glass panels, so that it looks as cool as possible. I really strongly feel like this is a movie that you should only watch in HDR on an OLED TV where the bright glow of the neon in the rain-slick night-time cityscapes can really pop, and where every elaborate setting can have the hyper-contrast and saturated colors that it’s supposed to have. This movie was only shot in 2K, so doesn’t really pull all the detail that a 4K Blu-ray is capable of, but in every other way, it’s basically a demo reel.

These are silly movies, but at this point I’ve come around on the silliness being fun, and the striking visuals being worth the price of admission all on their own.