John Wick: Chapter 4 is an eat-the-rich movie

John Wick is a hero? John Wick is a Hollywood blockbuster who feels neither like a hero nor a villain. After killing people to make large sums of cash, he fell in love and then embarked on a four-movie spree to revenge a personal insult. He’s not out to save the world, and he’s not interested in the morality of his actions. He’s just angry. The franchise will continue with John Wick: Chapter 4His anger is now a powerful target: The wealthy. John Wick believes that anyone possessing significant financial resources cannot be a victim of violence.

In the John Wick films, the business of murder is an honorable one, buttressed with rules and ensconced in luxury, to distinguish its practitioners from “the animals,” as hotelier-to-assassins Winston (Ian McShane) repeatedly says. The rules of contract murder are a big part of the John Wick franchise’s appeal: the biggest surprise of the first film wasn’t necessarily its commitment to surgically precise widescreen action that redefined the action-thriller genre, but the elaborate lore the film deliberately kept out of its trailers, which doesn’t come into play until midway through the movie.

The biggest fantasy element in the John Wick movies isn’t hypercompetent bloodshed, it’s the way people weaponize wealth. In his world, even the lowliest street thugs can compete for multimillion-dollar assassination bounties, but for the actual players — men like John and the assassin elite who want him dead — money isn’t a concern. Entitlement is. This idea is being sold starting from the first John Wick Onward means that anyone can enter a building and slide a token across the desk to expect supreme deference and luxury. All that is offered by these highly-strung spaces can be had for players who have the appropriate amount of money.

Lionsgate photo

This gives a new dimension to the Wickian gag where screenwriter Derek Kolstad and his various collaborators/successors give their supporting players titles that evoke trades found in the lifestyle industry. Arms dealers are “sommeliers,” “tailors” fashion bulletproof suits, and “concierges” make sure everything runs smoothly for every client, all from the desk of The Continental’s international chain of five-star hotels. There’s one in every city, and an assassin in the John Wick world has everything they need within its walls — including peace of mind, as one of the unbreakable rules of this world is that there is no “business” (meaning, no murder-for-pay) conducted on Continental grounds.

It’s death by Gentleman’s Quarterly, the idea that true wealth means that money itself isn’t needed. The films show less actual currency as the story progresses. Apart from the extra letter, John Wick is different than James Bond in that Wick movies are all about wealth and how it can be achieved.

Consider the nature of Wick’s antagonists as the films go on. The first film kicks into gear when Iosef (Alfie Allen), the reckless son of a Russian mobster, steals Wick’s car and kills his dog. Iosef’s arrogant thuggery comes with the swagger of the nouveau riche. His entitlement displays a lack of understanding of his immigrant father’s careful work to build the wealth he enjoys.

Lionsgate photo

Iosef’s father, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), is a crime lord, but a principled one in the Vito Corleone mold, someone who honors his relationships and understands that his status is fickle, constantly imperiled by desperate crooks beneath him and power players above him. Iosef’s arrogance is the domino that brings it all tumbling down, sending Wick on a journey that shows viewers just how deep this world’s criminal rabbit hole goes.

That’s reflected in the changing composition of John Wick’s body count. He begins by mowing down street-level gangsters at chop shops and bathhouses, then hires muscle in Old World ruins in Europe to work for tactically armed killing crews, which run him out of New York. Chap.The samurai SWAT team. The franchise has drifted from the flashy, loud crime of street kingpins to the theatrical opulence of the overlords many levels above them, who rely on an increasingly higher caliber of foot soldier, in addition to regularly sending Wick’s former colleagues against him.

Through this escalation, Wick gets further entangled in his former world’s economy of favors and power-brokers. The High Table oversees Wick’s world of assassins. This is a board consisting of twelve people. They are a Catholic organization of priests and reverent deference who maintain the balance of power worldwide. Wick’s vendettas against gangster-movie crime lords cause him to violate their rules, which in turn makes him the target of the High Table (and virtually every assassin alive), because the system’s integrity is only maintained if everyone obeys the wealthiest powers, the ones most distant from the mayhem they orchestrate.

Lionsgate image

All of which makes the John Wick movies an accidental commentary on wealth as violence: John Wick’s sin isn’t just getting out of the game, it’s returning to assassination and thinking he can just go back to exerting his privileges under the High Table without reintegrating himself into its strict economy of lives and debts. Wick is now single, although his wife is gone. He still has a relationship with his puppy, which he left as a way to focus on his humanity. A large, modern house and a car that he loves is his home. He seems to have no desire for anything.

That’s an exceptional existence, as we learn from Wick’s many disgruntled former colleagues, that the High Table barely tolerated. (Getting out of the assassin trade, as we’re told in Chap 2, required him to take on an “impossible task.”) Wick’s return to the assassin underworld is also tolerated, up until the point he starts breaking rules. Then he becomes an existential threat — because, he might, as they say, fuck up the money.

It is ironic that everyone pretends they are cleaner when Wick becomes closer to the High Table. Riches increase as people move from grimy dive bars into villas and estates in Casablanca to palatial homes in Paris. These are all properties of High Table players, or others who like to be close to them. Chap. 4Continues to depict Wick taking his revenge on those who profiteer from violence without ever being involved in it.

There is catharsis in watching him mow down the rich, even if he isn’t ideologically opposed to them. They’re just so pointedly insufferable — the Adjudicator (played by Asia Kate Dillon), who represents the High Table in John Wick Chapter 3 – ParabellumAs a representative for the institution that made their world turn, he moves around the globe with a clipped entitlement. On the other end of the spectrum is Bill Skarsgård as the Marquis Vincent de Gramont in Chap. 4. He’s an agent imbued with all the High Table’s authority and petty propriety. He is seen eating expensive pastries off tiny plates from large buffets that seem to be prepared only for his pleasure, having phones brought to him by underlings, and petulantly demanding to know why his massive army of killers hasn’t delivered him John Wick’s life yet.

Murray Close/Lionsgate

This sly shift from a vendetta against street-level criminals to an attack on the pampered elite makes John Wick’s goal not simple revenge against a person — the movies have long characterized him as a dead man walking, a guy who said goodbye to a happy ending the moment he picked up his gun again — but against an institution. The High Table, like many other genres, can be used to represent a variety of entities: the 1 percent in the real world, dominant religious orders or political regimes that oppress with the facade of democracy. It doesn’t matter, really. What matters is that Wick, like many in the modern world, is trapped by something much bigger than him, something he can’t possibly defeat. Perhaps a slow death march towards the source of his suffering can give him some comfort before his end.

If John Wick: Chapter 4 has a central question, it’s this: When is enough enough? John Wick is a murderer who has risen up the social ladder and travelled the globe. His existence is a threat to the 1 percent’s control of everything. But, it is a dubious idea to think that his violence could achieve any goals, as many movies have shown. It is impossible to find satisfaction. His puppy isn’t coming back, and the wife that puppy symbolized for him isn’t coming back. Even though its officiants are dropping like flies the High Table will continue to exist. Just as in the real world, in John Wick’s story, wealth and power have a way of self-perpetuating, and mostly trickling upward to a very few.

We are back at the original question: Who is John Wick as a hero? He’s one for audiences that feel a primal need to burn it all down and start over, who find the world so broken, they don’t know how to begin fixing it. But they sure do know who to blame — and in the John Wick movies, they know who to go to for satisfaction.