So this was not a good movie. Like the previous Johns Wick, it’s got some great visuals (the part where it turns from a third-person shooter into an isometric top-down shooter was especially nifty), but in this case, there’s just nothing underneath the surface.

The character development is basically non-existent, both for John himself (who says and does very little in this movie) and for the surrounding cast (Laurence Fishburne walks around giving grandiose speeches, but has no real point; there’s an assassin guy with a dog whose scenes could be completely excised without actually changing the movie in any way; the main antagonist is bland and stupid). The story is silly, of course. I don’t think world-building has ever been a real strength of the series, since it’s all deeply absurd, but at least in previous movies it was absurd and interesting, here it’s all just been-there-done-that tedium.

The movie is so flat that there’s (what I assume is meant to be) a big emotional moment in it, and it totally didn’t even register for me, because I assumed that it wasn’t really happening. I mean, there would have been some plot logic for it to be fake, and the movie itself didn’t seem to care about it, so… obviously not real, right? But oh, I guess it was. Huh. (Or… awful thought: Maybe they were leaving it vague, because they’re figuring out what they want to do with the franchise, ugh.)

Really, the whole movie is just a wasted opportunity. There should have been a story to tell here, there should have been a character arc to build. You could have had all the hyper-kinetic videogame-style action in almost the same way, but with just a little more dialogue, it could have all meant something and made the viewer care.

At nearly three hours, the movie doesn’t earn its running time. Bloated, dull, and tedious, it’s a disappointing maybe-finale to the series.