Zhang Yimou is among the world’s most masterful visual artists, beginning his career with vivid, colorful period pieces and eventually mixing in gracefully choreographed combat sequences; Hero and House of Flying Daggers are among the best action films from last decade. Shadow reverses his usual tendencies in a fitting way; the color is drained by limiting its set and costume design to shades of black and white while still being filmed in color.

This is a film of contrasts; in its color scheme, in its story, even in its structure. Everything about this movie’s design is very deliberate; the question isn’t whether it achieves its artistic goals, but whether those goals actually add up to something beyond their concept.

The flaw of this film’s affinity for stark contrasts is that it’s a story divided in two halves; political intrigue slowly leads into stunning combat. By dividing itself down the middle, the first half begins to feel like a narrative dump. The best slow films usually support themselves with stunning cinematography, and Shadow seems like it would have much to offer with such strong visual design – but because these sets are so artificial, not much is added by lingering on the image.

There are a few moments of training in this first half, but it naturally carries little stake. Much of it is people simply talking, setting up conflict that will later be resolved. Perhaps if all this didn’t feel like mere set-up for the true meat of the film, it would be more entertaining in its own right. It’s an exposed backbone to the full picture.

Thankfully, halfway through Shadow, the action finally kicks off and Zhang gifts us with a film that reminds us why he captured our attention all those years ago. Stark contrast is carried into the combat style, protagonist Jingzhou bringing an umbrella to a sabre fight in a battle of feminine grace versus blunt masculine force. As absurd as this sounds, the final result is surprisingly cool; this whole back half is loaded with stunning sequences exploring what these weaponized metal umbrellas can do.

Every element of the design has pay off here; the contrast of colors is highlighted by the sudden addition of spilled blood, while the heavy set-up grants these fights some serious stakes. The brutality of this film actually caught me off guard; this is a story of vengeance and backstabbing, and the final sequence is legitimately difficult to sit through.

As such, I almost want to say that brutally slow build-up is worth it; but there are other slow openings that I adore. The problem isn’t that Shadow‘s opening is slow, but that it’s tedious. The image itself is more engaging than how it’s captured here, and everything about its design works better in motion. It could have cut down quite a bit of time and only gained from doing so.

Shadow is a stunning action film with an unfortunate amount of build-up, but the final payoff is worth the tedium, especially when it moves into the chaos of its final act. Few films are as simultaneously graceful and horrific. Though it might not reach the heights of Zhang Yimou’s classics, Shadow is still a more evocative action film than most.

4 Stars Out of 5

The biopic is familiar territory, a genre with a tendency to fall into a disappointingly mundane sense of realism. These are stories of supposedly great people, and one would hope a film dedicated to their life would attempt to capture some sense of their spirit, especially when covering people of certain aesthetic sensibilities. Yet so many of these movies instead fixate on the supposed ‘truth’ of their story, sacrificing style to do so.

Here comes Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman, hot on the heels of the divisive Bohemian Rhapsody, on which he served as replacement director halfway through production – it’s clear this latter work has benefited from his total control. This is a film that kicks off with its protagonist barging into an AA session while decked out in a flamboyant devil costume, his first words leading into a childhood musical number.

Elton John has always been bigger than life, and Rocketman does so much to capture his grandiosity. Turning his life into a stylized musical that slips in and out of time lends his story a surprising energy; even if the plot beats seem familiar, what really matters is how they’re handled. This film rarely misses a beat, seamlessly stringing together elements of his life through musical numbers.

Taron Egerton kills it here as Elton. It’s difficult to match the real Elton on a vocal level, but Egerton does enough justice to lend these songs a distinct form; Rocketman is thoroughly a musical, not just a biography that happens to feature music, and part of that distinction is by giving the numbers a new shape. Egerton likewise captures the outward exuberance underlined by a familiar anxiety; the tortured artist is a common story, but again, it’s captured well here. Rocketman is a work that does little new, but it excels at the familiar.

Part of this strength stems from its subject; Elton John is one of the world’s biggest stars, but his personal life has always been shrouded by a prominent persona and his music. Most of his modern coverage, the stuff I’ve experienced, is dedicated to his now happy love life.

Part of what sets Rocketman apart is the fact it’s a story of a gay man that doesn’t end tragically. It largely avoids the common tropes of mainstream LGBT films, especially historical ones, while still diving into the more personally devastating elements of the experience. This is a story of living in a lonely world, where it’s easy to fall for people who are simply incapable of returning that feeling, where the options sometimes seem limited enough it’s easy to settle for someone less than alright. Most importantly, this is just one aspect of Elton’s grand life.

The film is surprisingly heavy throughout; though Elton obviously finds great success, everything is tinted with addiction and that crushing loneliness. We expect these stories to hit the highs and lows, but Rocketman actually tends to gloss over many of those high points as they get shrouded in turmoil. What’s strange about this film is the distance; musical numbers perhaps summarize certain eras too quickly, but this lends a certain affectation when combined with the framing device of Elton in counseling. The “Rocket Man” number begins with Elton perhaps at his lowest point and abruptly transforms into a surreal stage performance; how slyly but flamboyantly Fletcher captures someone trying to overlook their issues by focusing on the successes that in no way negate their problems.

Some of the musical numbers work better than others, but those that work are fantastic. The film starts off with “The Bitch is Back,” a perfectly campy choice for child Elton to sing in his innocent youth. The movie really gets rolling with the “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” sequence, which is loaded with stellar visual design while aging Elton from a child to young adult. This film is a visual treat, a key point that assists in setting this apart from most biopics.

Rocketman is about as good as Hollywood biopics can be, mixing the rather dark details of Elton John’s personal life with the extravagant styling of his public image. Taking a step back from realism really sells the actual story here, and hopefully future musician-based biopics take inspiration. Just as important, this is a mainstream LGBT film that really explores sexual identity as an aspect of the subject’s life without becoming fixated. Elton John has always stood as a definitive gay icon; Rocketman reminds us that he too struggled along the way while offering hope for a brighter future.

4 Stars Out of 5

Godzilla: King of the Monsters follows a group of really boring people as monsters sometimes fight in the background or, in rare moments where the filmmakers suddenly realize why we’re there, the foreground. This is a film that negates its own power in several ways. The title and advertising suggests epic battles among giant, world-threatening creatures, and it fails at so many of these concepts.

After Godzilla 2014 spent a bit too much time to reach the monster, this new one is eager to jump right in. However, that doesn’t stop the film from having several extended sequences where not much is happening. The human characters are really dull and sometimes infuriatingly dumb, causing every scene that focuses on them to be a total slog.

You’d hope this would be balanced by the creatures, but Dougherty seems resistant to let us linger. We get a few magnificent wide shots of these titans, but these mostly act as establishment. So many of the battles devolve into repetitive light shows, creatures firing beams of energy at each other; there isn’t nearly as much direct physical impact as there should be. These shots are rarely framed to capture both creatures at once, and most shots simply add up to a CGI creature framed against an empty sky. Unfortunately, many of the action scenes are as sluggish as the drama.

Being a Godzilla film, this goes beyond action and drama and belongs to the more specific monster/Kaiju movie category. The highlights of this genre largely stem from creatures threatening population centers. King of the Monsters has a few scared civilians scattered about, but so much of the human plot involves preparing enough to lure the threat elsewhere. Additionally, it’s mainly framed through people who are comparatively prepared for the attacks, reducing the tension.

As such, I’m not sure who this film is for; there are better stories about surviving a monster attack from the ground level, films that have truly dynamic battles battles between titans, and films that capture the terror of a city under attack. King of the Monsters really offers nothing exceptional.

Everything about this suggests an American studio afraid to tackle actual catastrophes. This gets highlighted by the structure of the final act; they completely undermine King Ghidorah by having him struggle to hunt down single human characters while in a seemingly empty city.

I really can’t emphasize enough how bad the human characters are. Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) is among the most misguided characters I’ve encountered, coming up with the brilliant plan to awaken the creatures to…save the world from humanity’s environmental destruction? The film presents this as if she put legitimate thought behind her actions and isn’t just a genocidal maniac; she’s essentially a poor version of Thanos. The fact her decisions drive most of the plot might explain why the stakes are so consistently fumbled; I can’t attach meaning to the battles when what causes them is so very, very dumb. Her actions only make sense in the context of a studio desperate to explain why all these creatures are waking at the same time. Why can’t “just because” ever be enough?

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a generic summer blockbuster, an action film that tries to emphasize visual effects while failing on most other technical grounds, all while telling a poorly conceived story. There’s no real reason to check this out unless you can’t get enough monster movies in your life.

2 Stars Out of 5

Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers, a young actress I only just encountered in last week’s Booksmart) moves to a new town with her mother and immediately gets invited to hang with the cool kids. While dredging around to get someone to buy them alcohol, she meets Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer), an apparently kind older woman who invites them to party in her basement after they’re busted. What no one realizes is that Sue Ann is the one who informed on them, the first of her many manipulations.

Ma is a surprisingly strong concept; there’s so much room here for subtle engineering on the part of Sue Ann, a woman who can piece together the group’s social fears while exploiting the fact they’re unlikely to tell their parents. Such a premise allows for a truly unique horror villain, one who is otherwise an ordinary person. Unfortunately, such a concept would require a certain subtlety to the actions of the antogonist – Ma seems to skip a necessary middle step in getting from light paranoia to full-on insanity.

The problems here largely fall back on the writing (as it does with many films that sell themselves purely off concept). The dialogue is supremely shallow; we spend so much of this movie operating as a teen drama, but these teenagers don’t seem to have real character beyond their narrative function. Story progression is similarly lacking.

Several scenes feel unnecessary. When the group first invites Maggie to join in, she tells them her mother is taking her to a music festival. The very next scene finds her mother saying she has to cover someone’s shift that night, therefore freeing Maggie up. Why present the music festival as an obstacle and then immediately negate it? Moments like these add little more than a minute to the movie’s length.

When we finally get to Sue Ann as a central focus, we start getting short flashbacks to her own time in high school, implying something must have happened to cause her current actions. These moments really don’t work for me – they feel like a cheap tactic to garner sympathy, but I think it would have been more effective as mere implication. The movie makes it very clear she’s targeting the children of her childhood tormentors; why not let us fill in the blanks? Knowing exactly what happens really adds nothing and might even detract; it carries some unfortunate implications about how the writers view trauma.

All of this adds up to a film that seems unsure of its own purpose; it devotes so much time to characters it isn’t really establishing and seems to undermine the presentation of its villain. The average horror film doesn’t necessarily need the most well-defined characters; the problem here is that the concept is based around social connections and communication failures. Even the final horrors seem directly tied into how the characters present themselves, but their lack of definition means it really doesn’t earn those moments.

The big highlight here is, naturally, watching Octavia Spencer play so hard against type. She completely hams it up; if Ma is an unsuccessful film, it has just enough camp to potentially linger as a minor cult hit.

Another nice detail here is that this is a rare horror film that largely lets the protagonists guide the narrative. Maggie and her friends are choosing to be present, even as the stakes keep rising. Unfortunately, this also highlights what’s lacking, since this would be so much more engaging if they were better defined.

In the end, I had fun with Ma, but it’s a film that could have been so much more in either direction. It’s not quite absurd enough to be a truly joyous midnight movie while too poorly structured to be a legitimate horror. It’s shapelessly mundane.

2.5 Stars Out of 5

Long Day’s Journey into Night is as disorienting as films come, shifting in and out of the past and present, dreams and reality, with little to help differentiate. There’s a girl and a gun, and that’s all we really need anyway.

This is a film defined by its structure, essentially a film in two distinct acts. This transition is separated by the title drop, which pops up over halfway through the film. The first half is one of restlessness, capturing the atmosphere of tossing in your sleep with dreams that don’t quite connect as your subconscious wildly struggles to fill in the blanks. The Tarkovsky influence is obvious; if you think the similarities to Mirror are mere coincidence, writer/director Bi Gan makes sure to include a sense with interior raining to drive the point home.

Such disorientation can sometimes be more unpleasant than not, and with Bi Gan borrowing so much from slow cinema philosophies, the first act can feel like a chore. But much like Cuaron’s Roma, there’s a purpose to the tedium; Gan is lulling us into a false sense of understanding before flipping into a completely different mode.

It’s the back half of Long Day’s Journey that justifies the whole experience. Like the first, this segment is marked by a distinctly dreamlike atmosphere; but if the first half is defined by a dream you can’t make sense of, the second is marked by growing awareness – yes, this is a dream, but Luo is gaining control.

Bi Gan employs an impressive technical feat to capture this atmosphere. This entire sequence is one enormous long take, traversing from a cave down a mountainside into a remote village, making sure to feature precise actions just to highlight the seeming impossibility of such a daring act. The opening vagueness is replaced with the blunt; it may be difficult to line up how these two halves line up, but the on-screen action in this sequence is more easily digested. If it lacks clear narrative logic, there’s heavy emotional weight.

Like the best surrealist works before it, Long Day’s Journey is a film that demands to be puzzled over; it gives an immediate sense that something has been missed, something that can be etched out with just the right level of care and attention. This is a film that gives back what you are willing to put into it.

This is an admittedly difficult film to review; I’m struggling to wrap my head around what I experienced here. While I’m unsure of certain plot points, I can easily say this film carries an overwhelming atmosphere of great beauty. So many shots carry a resonance even if I can’t fully place what they mean; never before has a title drop left me so shaken.

While it’s easy to emphasize the back half, the first half is similarly lined with mesmerizing moments. The opening shot implies an impossible physical location; a conversation on two sides of a fence is suggested to be at a prison but the background suggests an endlessly open area; a scene as a man cries while eating an apple in full hits with a surprisingly emotional punch. Bi Gan commands a stellar visual language.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is one of those challenging films designed with a very specific audience in mind; but if you belong to that cinematically-inclined group, this is likely to leave quite an impression. By abandoning narrative cohesion, Bi Gan has crafted a film with an evocative, almost mystical atmosphere.

4.5 Stars Out of 5

At this point, reviewing the Disney remakes and reboots feels as repetitive as the films being discussed; despite their narrative differences, they all follow the same design philosophy, largely falling back on simple film techniques as if they’re mere products instead of artistic productions. They ride off the success of their source material and rarely aspire to anything more, never exploring the possibilities provided by putting these stories in a new medium.

Aladdin does a good job sticking to its source material – Dumbo strayed and was worse for doing so, but a good writer could do something more. These remakes will never supplant the originals, so there needs to be some attempt to add a unique flavor; give a reason for these films to exist alongside the originals. Instead, Aladdin acts as an attempted replacement, which does no favor to either the original or this remake.

There’s plenty about this film that looks nice; it just doesn’t look as nice as the original. What could give these films an extra edge to coexist with the originals is seeing the world in a live action form; the sets and costumes are all nice enough. But because these remakes are so quick to fall into the routine of medium close-ups and shot-reverse shot editing, we rarely get a chance to just digest the visual design. There are a few moments where Aladdin attempts a longer take, especially during musical numbers, but they’re largely reduced by obvious reliance on CGI.

For whatever reason, Aladdin seems to have chosen Will Smith for an extra bit of star power to sell the film – I don’t think this film needed any recognizable star to sell. Is anyone going to see this movie due to his presence that otherwise wouldn’t? He’s passable, sometimes funny in his antics but really lacking when it comes to the musical numbers. Someone with a louder screen personality could have added an extra bit of flavor, but Disney appears resistant to anyone who might push these works past the familiarly pleasant.

It’s difficult to believe this is the same company that produced the originals; Disney has a history of playing it safe on a narrative level, being a company specializing in family films, but their films are marked by unique designs, distinct use of colors, and musical numbers that would sometimes fall into the surreal. These remakes are overly concerned with a sense of ‘realism’ that doesn’t match the tone or lend anything particularly charming to the experience. Everything appears muted compared to the original, similar enough to lack purpose and bland enough to lack inspiration.

One of the few notable changes between films is Jafar; like most classic Disney villains, the original is larger than life. The Jafar here is a lot quieter in his presence, and while this does work within the film, it also doesn’t particularly add anything. The original Jafar is striking and threatening; Disney doesn’t benefit by acting restrained. There’s also a notable new number by Princess Jasmine titled “Speechless,” which, again, is fine enough but doesn’t have the weight of any of the songs from the original.

Aladdin is acceptably average; nothing it does is particularly impressive or egregious. However, it will always be weighed down by the fact there’s an indisputably better version. This offers no reason to check it out instead of just revisiting the original, which has a tighter narrative and stronger presentation. I can mention that I did have fun with it, but that’s not worth much when I would have had more fun with the original. There are movies of lower quality this year that at least carry a sense of purpose, something unique to themselves.

Aladdin is exactly what we all knew it would be, Disney exploiting its own properties because they know it will make bank. The source material is good enough that this remake still carries many pleasant (if comparatively muted) moments. Disney knows how to make a functional film, but movies should do more than just function.

2.5 Stars Out of 5

Brightburn offers a promising take on the superhero genre, clearly riffing on Superman by offering the story of an alien child who lands on Earth and is raised on a quiet farm as if he were human. It’s classic “What If” fodder; where perhaps the most famous comic to change up Superman’s origin simply switches his landing to the Soviet Union, Brightburn instead presents an all-powerful being with ill intent.

This is a film that opens on a shot of a bookcase with at least four separate books on fertility, the camera panning to show the eventual adoptive parents getting ready for yet another attempt before being interrupted by the crash landing. The entire film has this amateur quality, over-explaining every detail as if we’re completely incapable. For example, Brandon Breyer, our evil alien child, comes up with a signature that he leaves at his crime scenes – we get scenes of the sheriff finding this marking at both, and then another where he goes back to his office to match up pictures of the two to show that, yes, he recognizes the connection.

The movie sold itself on James Gunn’s name, but it was written by his brother and a cousin and directed by David Yarovesky, a man with little experience but carrying a clear connection to Gunn considering his credits. It’s hard to view this as anything beyond classic Hollywood nepotism, a film elevated to a bigger budget and release than its screenplay deserves.

While promising a dark twist on the Superman mythos, Brightburn has little ambition beyond any run-of-the-mill ‘creepy child’ story. The whole tension of such a plot should be a family coping with the realization their beloved child is turning into a monster, but we simply gloss over their bonding and Brandon’s transformation is too sudden to have any real impact. The Gunns also take the most boring option for why Brandon becomes evil; it’s no internal discovery or inherent trait that bubbles up as he grows, but rather outside interference that essentially amounts to brainwashing. He simply isn’t the same character before and after, which voids any sense of emotional weight.

With any horror movie, I think it’s important to question what acts as the source of terror; Brightburn‘s narrative hook is a fresh domestic horror concept, suggesting a family with a dark secret that they must either learn to accept or perish. Brightburn all too quickly pits Brandon against his family; he is posited as an outsider, completely negating the familial connection. The Gunns don’t even suggest the parents might go along with his atrocities out of misguided love; they are immediately wary once they see clear signs of his lunacy.

Because of this, the source of horror instead stems from an untouchable, mindless killer hunting down innocent people; Brightburn is a slasher film. This could be fine; a superhero slasher would also be a unique concept, but instead of relying on tension, Brightburn simply tries to be as gory as possible. As the trailers were far too eager to show off, there’s a disgusting shot of a woman pulling a piece of glass from her eye. It’s not scary, it’s just gross and discomforting. This scene sets an atmosphere where, instead of being afraid for its characters, I’m instead annoyed with an expectation that any moment of horror is going to be unnecessarily crude.

Having any tension during these moments would require some sense of character, but I really can’t make any firm statement about who these people are. The entire family is purely defined by their perception of Brandon; what do his parents do besides worry about him? Do they have their own lives? The only reason Brandon goes after anyone is because they seem aware of his evil side, but he also does absolutely nothing to hide that aspect. A typical slasher keeps the villain at a distance, but Brandon is just as vapid while being a central focus.

Brightburn is a prime example of why writing matters so much more than a strong concept; there’s so much promise here, but the Gunns do nothing besides perhaps blocking a better writer from tackling a similar idea for the next several years. Don’t be fooled by the superhero coating, this carries all the weight of a Conjuring universe spin-off.

1.5 Stars Out of 5

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, is a stellar tale of two intelligent best friends who realize on the eve of high school graduation that the kids they derided for having fun actually ended up getting into the same schools. Taking this information as a wake-up call, the two end up on a journey of identity and self-discovery.

Booksmart stays tightly focused, largely set over a single night as Amy and Molly desperately search for the party hosted by the most popular kid in school. In some sort of Gatsby-inspired curse, they wander from wrong location to wrong location, hitting all the other parties by mistake.

A film like this rides on the essence of its characters; each of these parties is imbued with how the host (sometimes wrongly) views their own image – much of this movie finds characters having to take a hard look in the mirror as they realize no one they’ve grown up with really knows them, at least not in the way they’ve come to know themselves.

What is the self, anyway? True to life, those characters who aren’t questioning this seem assured of their own standing – but most are lost in a game of identity, grandstanding with a certain image to hide the uncertainty bubbling beneath.

Being a proper take on the high school experience, Booksmart is in many ways crass – this is a comedy of drugs, lust, and cringe-inducing awkwardness. However, none of these jokes operate at the expense of the characters; if they appear to be, it’s only so the film can later come back and question why. A movie like this can only reach such heights with a certain level of sincerity that Wilde delivers with grace.

Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are phenomenal as these two best friends. The movie expertly starts us off by giving these two some alone time, engaging in an intentional bout of awkward dancing. Amy and Molly are dorks, but they’re dorks with an awareness and appreciation of that fact. It’s only in the presence of others that they fold and put up visible barriers.

This quality stretches well beyond the leads; this is a rare story that fleshes out nearly every character it introduces. The standout here is Billie Lourd as Gigi, the depressive rich girl who just keeps popping up, an almost mystical figure that adds to that bizarre sense there’s some outside presence guiding the girls through this night. We meet Jared, the other rich kid who hands out shirts with his own face printed on the front, comically pathetic until it becomes understood as ignorant desperation. Most of the characters get some sort of arc, revealing something way beyond our tainted first impression – the whole film glides by, eventually jumping between characters as it nears the climax.

This movie is going to be compared to Lady Bird for obvious reasons, both covering the feeling of high school graduation and also featuring Beanie Feldstein in a prominent role – but the film I kept drawing comparisons with is Burnham’s Eighth Grade. Beyond being tales of awkward school life, both films really understand the power of sound.

Where Eighth Grade would seamlessly blend montage through ambience, Booksmart backs its best scenes with an equally stellar soundtrack. A scene that follows Amy through a pool becomes mesmerizing with the assistance of Perfume Genius’s achingly beautiful “Slip Away,” while LCD Soundsystem’s gently longing “Oh Baby” helps wind down the eventful night. These choices are so precise – and the film is smart enough to hit an emotional height during a key scene by reducing sound altogether.

Like Eighth Grade, Booksmart pushes beyond simple humor and acts as a constant reminder of the dread that underlines growing up in a community where you know the same group of people for years, and despite all that time together, no one really sees you. This carries the same sort of awkward humor that drives the most brutal cringe comedies, but by showing the characters as at least somewhat aware of their flaws, this awkwardness is marked with a certain anxiety. Teenage awkwardness is understood by this film as largely rooted in kids trying and failing to present the image they want to be seen with.

Booksmart should go down as one of the all-time great high school comedies, one that balances a hysterical script with truly meaningful observations. This film is a celebration of those early academic years, not by idealizing youth but by acknowledging how wonderful it is that we manage to carry through such adversity and come out with a better sense of self. Like the characters it studies, Booksmart is a film of several layers, one that masterfully merges teen antics with self-aware statements about why teenagers perform the way they do.

5 Stars Out of 5

John Wick has become a definitive name in modern action cinema. The first film established a certain visual flair by leaning hard into gun fu tropes, while Chapter 2 ramped it up with an ever-expanding world while maintaining focus on phenomenal choreography. The series carries an almost surreal air, giving just enough information to link these sequences of violence together, and Chapter 3 – Parabellum runs wild with the threat established at the end of the previous film.

A common complaint I’ll have about modern spectacle films is their apparent need to justify the visuals. Films like Alita and Detective Pikachu dive into concepts they don’t need to as if it will add some sort of meaning, as if a unique style isn’t reason enough. John Wick stands above so many action films because it realizes just how little you need to give; its minimal set-up lends the franchise an ethereal quality. Watching Parabellum is like falling into a violent dream.

For the third chapter, the world of John Wick has already been set in motion; assassins line every street, the entire world coming down on our protagonist who just wanted to avenge his dog. Parabellum basks in the freedom allotted by the end of Chapter 2 – however, this also means the film lacks the sense of escalation from the previous films. How do you go further than this suggestion that the organization is literally everywhere?

What it lacks in mystique, Chapter 3 makes up for with stunning choreography – this has always been a high point of the series, but it reaches new heights here. A motorcycle chase along a bridge, an attack dog-assisted shootout in Morocco, a barn with weaponized horses – each scene is striking in its physicality while touring several vibrant locales. We know what John Wick can do with a pencil, but what about a library book?

Chapter 3 introduces two new major characters, one which reinforces the mystique while the other adds an entirely new layer to the franchise. Asia Kate Dillon appears as the Adjudicator, carrying a severe presence (and a pair of gloves) as they promise future hellfire upon everyone that dared to assist John Wick during the previous film. They appear emotionally void, a heartless enforcer of the High Table’s will – just inhuman enough to remind us that this world is a mere simulacrum of our own.

Zero, played by Mark Dacascos, becomes an absolute scene stealer. Despite its bizarre nature, most everyone within this franchise treats their situation as they should, living in states of paranoia that any stranger could be in a position to profit from their death. Zero, however, operates as a disconnected fanboy, someone who admires John Wick and hunts him down as much because he wants to see the legend in action as he feels guided by the High Table.

This character carries an almost humorous tone, but his presence is so out of place that it instead turns uncanny. In such a dire world, a character this carefree is the best way to capture someone truly mad. One thing I found lacking in the first two John Wick films was a compelling villain for Wick to face off against; the villains were people in power, not ones who did their own fighting. Despite not being the true villain of the story, Zero plays a perfect dragon to the High Table, allowing the film to build up to a distinctive climactic battle.

John Wick is simply the most consistently strong action franchise Hollywood has put out in decades. It has never missed a beat, pushing past easy options to make sure every scene carries some new purpose, whether building its macabre world or exploring radically stylized methods of violence. The series has always been a beautiful ballet of blood and bullets, and the third manages to outshine its predecessors on nearly all levels.

4 Stars Out of 5