In the Flesh: John Wick 3: Parabellum

In its centerpiece action scene John Wick's latest outing juxtaposes ballet and bloodshed before bringing the two together. The crack in its analogy isn't that the meticulous and often inventive choreography of the movie's action scenes isn't art but that ballet uses bodies in motion to tell stories, to explore through formal perfection the connection between movement and meaning. John Wick tells a story, sure, but that story is minimal by design, connective tissue used to string together action sequences. The only problem is that after God knows how many hundreds of murdered minions that minimal frame and the similarly unremarkable performance on which it's been hung are starting to look pretty thin.

Parabellum has neither the bland, washed-out color palette of the series' first entry nor the baggy nonsense story of its second, but its 131-minute run time burns through the goodwill these course corrections earn. Maybe forty minutes of the film could disappear without putting so much as a dent in the story, and when it hits minute nine of Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry shooting a bunch of knife-wielding Morrocans after enduring the far deadlier peril of Jerome Flynn's Italian accent I really started wishing I could climb up into the projection room and excise that half hour-plus myself. 

The propulsive motorcycle sword fight, the shockingly brutal showdown between Wick and a towering seven-foot-plus assassin; these set pieces are where the movie shines. When it shifts to gunplay, though, it becomes bogged down in scale, straining the bounds of its creativity through sheer weight of repetition. Gimmicks like Wick slapping a horse to make it kick an assailant to death are effective at first, exciting knee-slappers out of left field, but when they're repeated four times in a row the magic starts to wear off. Parabellum lacks restraint, and its sagging run time undercuts its most entertaining strengths.

The movie has plenty to like. A gothed up Asia Kate Dillon as an icily imperious High Table bureaucrat, the aforementioned motorcycle sequence, the deep and buttery golds of its opening fight scenes and the lovingly garish colors of its Russian ballet and Casablanca segments, the spidery scratch of metal over glass during its sword fights. There are lively minds producing exciting imagery here, but Reeves is a placeholder and the story is nothing but a dead wife and a vaguely ridiculous globe-spanning criminal organization. I'm hard-pressed to think of something dumber in a modern action movie than the analog switchboard room staffed by rockabilly secretaries.

Parabellum is neither as operatic nor as interesting as it would need to be to justify its length, and with a camera only intermittently capable of connecting to the emotions of the movie's action -- a few scenes with Lance Reddick and Halle Berry manage to put the viewer in the shootouts -- there just isn't much to it when all it said and done. Some beautiful color, some delightful violence, and that's pretty much it. The faintly silly and sometimes intriguing world these films have spun is emotionally tepid, the bombastic but shallow characters it contains uninteresting to watch in motion. If this is ballet, its form needs work.