“Why don’t you just die?” screams one of the hundreds of people looking to kill the titular character in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the wild new Keanu Reeves assassin movie now playing in theatres.
Why doesn’t he just die? Because he’s John Wick, a mix of Anton Chigurgh, Wile E. Coyote and the Energizer Bunny, that’s why.
If you’re a fan of the movies, you already know Wick can take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. You don’t need the backstory to enjoy the new film, but it might help. Here’s a quick John Wick Wiki to get you up to speed.
The John Wick Universe is a place where an association of twelve crime lords, called the High Table, govern the underworld’s most powerful criminal organizations. They control the Continental, a hotel chain with exclusive branches sprinkled across the globe that serve as homebases for assassins. It is a place run by a strict set of rules, like never do “business” on the premises, by managers like Wick’s friend Winston Scott (Ian McShane) who runs the New York outlet.
Legendary hitman Wick ran afoul of the High Table, and was declared excommunicado. He is persona non grata and they want him dead. Trouble is, he’s hard to kill.
Also, he really loves dogs as much he loves killing people. There. You’re caught up.
At the beginning of the new film, High Table elder and all-round psychopath, Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), displeased with Winston’s continuing connection to Wick, decommissions the Continental New York. “He is the face of your failure,” he sneers.
With one of his last allies rendered powerless, Wick must get to the Marquis before the Marquis can get to him.
Cue an amount of mayhem rarely seen this side of Russian car wreck videos on YouTube.
At 2 hours and 49 minutes “John Wick: Chapter 4” is by far the longest film in the franchise. Heck, it’s even longer than “Pulp Fiction,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “Raging Bull,” but director Chad Stahelski maintains interest, staging at least one major action sequence, more like a well-choreographed ballet for the blood thirsty, each hour. People get gone in spectacular ways, Wick defies the laws of physics and medical science to get his revenge and some of the world’s most beautiful locations become the backdrop to Wick style mayhem.
A scene staged in the roundabout circling Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile is an eyepopper, one of the best big screen action scenes in recent years not directed by George Miller. A shoot out on the 200 steps of Paris’s Sacré-Cœur has an anarchic cartoon vibe that would make the Tasmanian Devil envious. Tom Cruise may be famous for his signature run, but after this, I think, Reeves will be remembered for falling down stairs. It’s a wild, extended ticking-clock sequence that uses slapstick humor to alleviate the tension as Wick violently makes his way to a date with destiny.
Adding to the action sweepstakes are Hong Kong martial arts superstar Donnie Yen as the blind assassin Caine, and legendary Japanese actor and martial artist Hiroyuki Sanada, last seen on screen with Reeves in 2013’s “47 Ronin,” who plays the manager of the Osaka Continental Hotel and an old friend of Wick. Yen is effortlessly cool, with an elegant and humorous fighting style that threatens to steal the show from Wick’s blunt force. Sanada has fighting skills and brings gravitas to the character, a man who values loyalty above all. The personality each bring to their scenes adds much to the effectiveness of the action.
Director Stahelski stages several all-timer action scenes with grace and inventiveness, always remembering to keep the frenetic battles clean and easy to follow.
Of course, the Wick movies are all about the central character, a man whose path to inner peace is littered with the bodies of the people he’s killed. Like a character straight out of a Sergio Leone film, he is a man of few words, and few motivations. In part, that is what makes the character and the movies so enjoyable. He may be the most lethal man on the planet, but, in each movie, his violent tendencies are in service of one objective. There is no muddled middle ground for Wick, no waffling, and that clarity of purpose keeps the movies from becoming cluttered, even at an epic 169-minute run time.
If “John Wick: Chapter 4” is the last film starring Keanu Reeves in the series—it is set-up for spin-offs within the Wickverse—then it goes out with a bang.
I introed the Canadian premier of “John Wick: Chapter 4” with stars Keanu Reeves and Shamier Anderson and director Chad Stahelski. Instead of the planned Q&A, they did a tribute to Lance Reddick, a co-star in all four Wick movies, who passed away earlier in the day.
“Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday,” now on VOD, is a sequel to a movie you probably haven’t seen, but if you enjoy silly action movies, you might want to put your brain in neutral and schedule a double bill.
Mike Fallon, played by Scott Adkins, is a hired killer with an unusual specialty. He makes his murders look like accidents. “It’s a dirty job” he says, “But I’m willing to get my hands bleeding filthy for the right price.”
Known professionally as Accident Man, when we first meet him in “Hitman’s Holiday” he’s on the scene of a rave, making the death of a DJ look like part of the show.
Looking to get out of town for a spell, until things cool down in England, he grabs a fake passport and hightails it to Malta. He loves the weather and the beer, but unfortunately, the good life is interrupted when Accident Man and his partner, Finicky Fred (Perry Benson), a designer of unusual death machines, are kidnapped by Mrs. Zuuzer (Flaminia Cinque), Malta’s top crime boss.
Her offer is a simple one, keep her son Dante (George Fouracres), who has multiple contracts out on his head, alive. If he does, then Fred will also live to see another day. “I’m not a babysitter,” he says. “I’m a professional killer,” but out of loyalty to Fred, he takes the gig.
To keep his end of the bargain, he’ll have to battle five of the world’s top assassins and possibly rekindle a relationship with Big Ray (Ray Stevenson), a former father-figure—“Imagine if the bloody Terminator was your surrogate father.”—who thinks Accident Man owes him a debt.
“Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday” is a bit of low budget fun. A throwback to the kinds of b-action movies that played on the lower half at midnight madness screenings, it feels like either a tribute to or a satire of, Jason Statham movies. I can’t tell which it is. It contains the same kind of action man moves as Statham, but it doesn’t take itself as seriously. And it is not afraid to get gross.
The ultra-violence and stylized shooting owe a debt to not only to Statham, but also to Guy Ritchie and every movie that values hand-to-hand fisticuffs over computer generated mayhem.
The story in “Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday” is paper thin, the characters are caricatures—like the assassin who cannot feel pain—but it’s just colorful enough to be a bit of mindless fun.
“Day Shift,” a new action comedy starring Jamie Foxx, and now streaming on Netflix, brings a supernatural twist to the familiar story of a father doing what he has to do to hang on to his family.
Foxx plays Bud, a San Fernando Valley pool cleaner and undercover vampire slayer. A fearless hunter of the undead while on the job, at home he’s a devoted father, but things aren’t going well. He and his wife Joceyln (Meagan Good) have separated, and unless Bud can come up with $5000 to pay for private school tuition for daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax), mother and daughter are going to move to Florida.
Neither the pool cleaning or freelance vampire killing pay what they used to, and when a local pawnbroker (Peter Stormare) offers him a fraction of what his trophy vampire fangs are worth, he is left with only one option, join the vampire-hunter’s union.
Trouble is, they don’t want him. “You expect me to let you back in where the sun don’t shine?” asks union leader Ralph Seeger (Eric Lange). He’s a rebel, he doesn’t follow the rules, he’s a wild card but when legendary vamp killer Big John Elliott (Snoop Dogg) vouches for him, Bud gets in, but the union has him on probation and his every move will be monitored by straightlaced union rep Seth (Dave Franco). “I have to be with you at all times in the field,” Seth says. “Union rules.”
Bud can now earn the money he needs to keep his family together, unless elder vampire Audrey San Fernando (Karla Souza) gets her bloody revenge on him for killing her undead daughter.
“Day Shift” is an action comedy with an emphasis on bloody action. Between the decapitations, martial arts fight sequences, wooden stakings and Snoop’s Big Bertha rapid fire machine gun, this one has a much higher body count than your usual laugh fest. Foxx does his best to bleed the laughs out of the script. He’s a convincing action star, a kind of jokey Blade, who also has a way with a one-liner. His presence adds some much-needed lightness and his chemistry with Franco makes the character of Seth a tad less irksome.
“Day Shift” suffers from an underwritten script and overwrought plot turns, but despite all that, the action, Foxx and Snoop makes for a pretty good Saturday matinee style horror comedy à la “Monster Squad” or “Fright Night.”
In an unconscious way Rachel McAdams has been preparing to play Dr. Christine Palmer in Doctor Strange her whole life.
“My mother is a nurse,” says the London, Ontario born actress. “She is a very compassionate kind of nurse and Christine is sort of that way as a doctor. She has excellent bedside manner as opposed to Doctor Strange. I took a page from my mom.
“I’ve been talking to her about it for my whole life. She brought her job home sometimes. I picked it up over the years.”
Doctor Strange, the fourteenth film in the Marvel Universe aims to introduce you to the neurosurgeon, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who goes from saving lives to saving planets. Trauma surgeon Dr. Palmer is his ex-girlfriend but still a constant in his life, and later, when things get mystical, his anchor to the real world.
“It’s a much less typical love trajectory,” she says of their connection. “I think because we had so few scenes to establish our relationship it was a better jumping off point. We had a lot more subterranean life and a much richer history for the characters.”
In the comic books Christine Palmer is a very different person than the one McAdams brings to life on the screen.
“She is an amalgamation of a couple of characters,” she says. “It gave us a lot of creative freedom. We were inventing something. I kind of looked at the comic books more for the flavour of the world and Doctor Strange himself and less so for my character.”
McAdams’s nurse mother may have helped the actress access the emotional side of playing a doctor, but what about the practical stuff, like tying a suture?
“This great neurosurgeon we had on set with us taught us how to sew up a raw turkey breast,” she laughs. “I guess it’s the closest thing to a real live human being, Poor turkey. Then I used oranges, which were easier to carry in my purse. Better smell too. I also had a fake head to practice on. It was kind of like knitting. I would take the suture stuff around, put it on a light stand while we were shooting and practice. I still have sutures on my doorknobs. Haven’t gotten around to cutting them off yet.
“I was really nervous about it because I thought it was going to take forever but it is just one of those thing that one you get the hang of it it’s kind of fun to do.”
The result of all her work is a movie she calls “an ambitious film on the page that I think ticks a lot of those boxes for people are hoping for when they go see a big, blow-out Marvel film. There’s also a quiet deep emotion that runs through it that may catch people off guard.
“I find it hard to get swept away by a film I am in,” she adds, “because I look at it differently, but I actually jumped at one point in my own scene. My friends were laughing. ‘You knew that was coming!’ I know, but I was wrapped up in it.”
As everybody knows The Avengers exist to save the planet from physical threats like rogue sentient robots and red skulled Nazis. But who protects us from metaphysical danger? Apparently a guy in a crazy cape who looks a lot like Sherlock Holmes.
If you’re not familiar with Stephen Strange, “Doctor Strange,” the fourteenth film in the Marvel Universe introduces you to the neurosurgeon who goes from saving lives to saving planets.
When we first meet Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) he’s a gifted surgeon, a good-looking mix of ambition, charm and arrogance. When a car accident leaves him with severe nerve damage in his hands, he feels he has lost his best asset. The fingers that one’s free-handed complicated nerve surgery cannot now even hold a pen.
His search for a cure leads him to Jonathan Pangborn (Benjamin Bratt), a paraplegic who regained use of his hands and legs. “You came back from a place there is no coming back from,” says Strange. “I’m trying to find my way back.” Pangborn tells the desperate man of a place in Kathmandu, Nepal where he can experience a spiritual journey of healing.
In Nepul he meets the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) an immortal Celt and Sorceress Supreme who teaches Strange some weird new tricks. With her guidance and his photographic memory, he quickly learns how to re-orient the spirit to heal the body. He also discovers who to teleport himself form one place to another and control the very fabric of time. Nifty stuff.
His lessons come in handy when Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), a former student, returns to steal a single page of an ancient text. The spell contained on the page would give him a power over time that would make Dr. Who envious. His endgame is to join our world with the Dark Dimension, a place beyond time, thus ensuring life eternal. With the very essence of time at stake can Doctor Strange take a licking, but keep on ticking?
Despite a plot that deals with horology and the metaphysical make-up of the universe, “Doctor Strange” doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s an origin story, pure and simple, that breaks up the interdimensional gobbledegook with bits of levity. Add to that a running gag with Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and some very trippy visuals and you have a movie that feels fresh despite being yet another origin tale.
Cumberbatch’s take on Strange echoes Marvel’s Tony Stark character. He’s arrogant and quick with a line, but where Stark had an air of unpredictability about him, Strange has none. He’s driven by ego and a need to get his life back, not the darker, and more interesting urges that propelled Stark’s world-saving.
Instead the movie focuses on bringing his experience to vivid life. As Strange begins his mystical journey director Scott Derrickson fills the screen with kaleidoscopic images. The trippy pictures entertain the eye and lend an authentic comic book feel to the movie that is sometimes missed in these big screen adaptations. Who knows how many pixels were harmed to create the hallucinogenic M.C. Escher-esque folding landscapes. Imagine the shifting terrains of “Inception,” but on steroids and you get the idea.
It takes some doing to stand out amid the film’s psychedelic visuals but Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One and Chiwetel Ejiofor as mentor Karl Mordo stand head and shoulders above the fray. Swinton sidesteps early criticism of character whitewashing—in the comic books the Ancient One is generally portrayed as a Tibetan man—by handing in an androgynous character who identifies as Celtic.
“Doctor Strange” is a lively mix of mysticism and mirth that breathes some new life into the Marvel Universe.
Richard hosted a Facebook Live session with “Doctor Strange” star Rachel McAdams! Find out how the actress prepared for the suturing scenes, what she has to say about working with Benedict Cumberbatch and who her favourite Marvel superhero is! See the video on Marvel Facebook Page!
