This image released by Lionsgate shows Keanu Reeves, left, and Anjelica Huston in a scene from “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.” (Niko Tavernise/Lionsgate via AP)
Movies can be blessedly simple. As the first “John Wick” showed, all you really need is a car, a gun, a dead dog and Keanu Reeves. Who needs “kiss kiss” when you’ve got plenty of “bang bang”?
Alas, nothing in today’s movie-land stays minor-key. Chad Stahelski’s “John Wick” has quickly spouted into a three-and-counting series, the latest of which is “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.” What was once a taut, minimalist action movie with an appeal predicated on low-expectations and leanness has grown into a franchise with a typically overcooked subtitle and de-rigueur world-building (the film’s press notes reference “the Wickian universe”).
“Parabellum” finds Stahelski, Reeves’ former stunt double who has directed all three films, moving further beyond Wick’s hardboiled origins and into a more extravagant action thriller. In its ever-expanding fictional realm, “Parabellum” isn’t so dissimilar from a superhero movie, only one with way more blood, a much higher body count and, yes, righteously better action scenes.
It starts right where we left off with Reeves’ uber-hitman. He’s on the run in New York having violated the fiercely enforced rules of the High Table, an international assassin’s guild that sets combat protocol for a vast criminal netherworld, including that no “business” should be conducted in the Continental, the Manhattan hotel presided over with panache by its manager, Winston (Ian McShane).
Ruthless as the world of John Wick is, it’s a rigidly ordered one, full of slavish fidelity to a warrior code that’s part samurai, part magician. There’s a $14 million bounty on Wick’s head, just posted by the High Table, which has begun a soon-to-conclude countdown to make Wick “excommunicado.” For every other bounty hunter, it’s open-season on John Wick. And in these films, one lurks down every alley; the ratio of regular person to hitman is, like, 2 to 1.