(SPOILER FREE PART)

It feels like every John Wick movie is a remastered version of a previous one. Better choreography, better fight scenes, better visuals, bigger budged but it's more or less the same movie with the same meh story and the same meh characters. Of course most of us know what a John Wick movie is so no one's surprised here. And if it is exactly what you're expecting than you won't be disappointed.

FIRST, THE GOOD THINGS

Cinematography and production design, especially the colours. The colour palette is beautiful, maybe overdone here and there but most of the time it's just beautiful.

Fight scene choreography is top tier as it was in previous movies and probably even better.

Music is pretty good and in combination with the visuals it creates a really stylish and pleasant to look at movie.

THE NOT SO GOOD THINGS

The characters are kind of cheesy as is the whole story, it's not terrible but it is not memorable.

Also there's this feeling about this movie that the only thing that the creators were focusing on is how to improve action sequences at any cost even if it makes movie completely unrealistic. And I GET IT it is not supposed to be very realistic but at least it should be somewhat believable because sometimes it is so not believable that it's just breaking the immersion where this could be avoided.

The worst part for me was the disconnection between the fight scenes and the surroundings like everything that happens to the characters happens in this fake world. It felt like the everything around the ones involved in the fights is just there to make it look good and make us believe that all of this is happening in the real world and not a movie set but it completely fails at that and feels like like some kind of exhibition of fight choreography.

(SPOILERS BELOW)

Couple of examples :

Heaven and Hell nightclub scene.

People mindlessly dancing and not paying attention to the gun chase that is happening in front of them. Shots were fired, axes were thrown, people were running, fist fighting, bleeding, falling down from deadly heights. Almost nobody cared. I GET IT we are supposed to believe that the music is very loud, people are maybe under influence of alcohol or whatever else but I mean come on shot were fired...

The Place de l'Etoile roundabout shootout.

This scene was very similar to the aforementioned.

Once again the unresponsiveness from the cars around them was very immersion breaking. People were driving around like nothing is happening even though dead bodies should be lying around, multiple people walking and shooting in the middle of extremely busy traffic. Every car in the scene felt like was driven by the NPCs from a video game that have their dedicated route and it doesn't matter if they hit your with a car or not they will continue to go like nothing happened. And the end of the scene they show you the aftermath so you would think that this whole thing had some kind of effect to the traffic but until that point it didn't feel like that at all.

Also the whole fight scene was so unnecessary long just to show some crazy moments were the baddies and John Wick himself was hit by the cars multiple times. At least those moments were indeed impressive. But if the scene was at least a lot shorter it wouldn't be as unbelievable as it was.

And the scene on the stairs...was it really necessary? Did people actually enjoy yet another super long shootout scene where Wick kills yet another 50 bad guys but now on his way up the stairs (twice!) We've seen that already.

And the blind guy...I mean come on he's blind...

All these things that I've mentioned does not make John Wick 4 a bad movie but it is definitely not the best action movie as some wants to claim it may not even be the best overall John Wick movie.

If you can turn off your brain and just enjoy the fight choreography you will probably enjoy it, but it feels like JW4 wants you to turn off your brain the most out of all 4 movies.

All in all the movie wasn't bad, it's a bit too long, too unrealistic and the ending is unsatisfying.

I can see why people love it and I can see why people hate it. People want different things out of a movie and John Wick 4 delivers exceptionally well in certain areas while being mediocre in others.

A quick summary is I had a fking great time watching it at some points and a little bored during others. The action scenes are fantastic. It's a TON of fun and really cool to watch. A little towards the middle of the film it did feel a bit slow and dragged out. Cutting out 15 mins would be perfect.

Held up by good action and decent laughs is the weak story. I absolutely LOVE the idea of the underground black market, the continentals, and the high table. I wish we got to see more of that world. I wanted more backstory, more exposure, more display of how they ran behind the scenes. Hopefully I'll get to see that in the Ballerina and Continental.

The other thing I think hindered the movie was that the idea of the high table got watered down. They started off as some serious group that mean business that you don't want to mess with. In John Wick 4 I felt like they were kind of a joke and not really as big as mean as people made them out to be. John Wick was just so broken in the 4th chapter. I know it's the whole appeal of John Wick but it does take away from the story and suspense when, even with suspension of disbelief, is just pure absolute absurdity. But that's also why I love it!

I swear John Wick can take more hits than some Avengers. He's like a tank with the body of Wolverine.

But regardless of what you're looking for you have to give it to the crew for how much work and dedication they put in to this movie. The quality really shows here. It's just really fun and exciting to watch. I rate it higher than the other John Wick films even though it's not my favorite just because in 9 out of 10 ways it's bigger and better.

But I love the other John Wick films because we got more backstory, more Continental, and more focus on story.

Imagine a video game where you are shooting bad guys. Your hardware is old so everything is kind of slow and out of focus. The opponents are set to Easy and you installed a hack to give you invincibility and autoaim. And they come at you slowly, shouting, out in the open, with weapons that fire three or four bullets before they run out and they can shoot anything anyway. They use no snipers, no explosives, no traps of any kind. They can't even hit you when they're next to you and wielding a knife. And you try to fight them in a decent manner, yet your avatar moves like a 60 year old man and even with the autoaim you still suck. And if you somehow get into the many separate levels where nothing make sense, you get a big cinematic that takes you out of it. And because the cinematic is in 4k or whatever, it feels like slow motion.

That, my friends, is the experience of watching JW4. The style that people have applauded in the first movie has turned into a demented caricature, the fight scenes are ridiculously bad, the actions of the characters make no sense at all, the world described makes no sense. Not even the tongue-in-cheek references to The Matrix don't hit, because you know that if you enjoyed that film, you're now over 40 and it makes you feel old. The film is three hours of irrelevance.

And if you are among the people who I can't understand that rated this film anything above boring, just watch the end credits scene. It destroys the little joy that you might have kept watching this.

Bottom line: So many talented people worked on this film. With them on board, I cannot imagine a worse outcome. It's not even funny, it's just sad.