Fearing that the High Table won’t believe he stopped treatment at the chiming of the hour, the doctor commands John to shoot him in nonlethal places, offering the criminal overlords a false but persuasive sign that he was forced to help.
The doctor is racing against the clock-at 6 P.M. John, stabbed by one of its minions at the main branch of the New York Public Library (where he makes good on the proverb about the might of words by using a book as a lethal weapon against a swordsman), goes to Chinatown and is sewn up by an elderly doctor (Randall Duk Kim). This paranoid premise is the starting point for “Chapter 3.” The High Table still has it in for John, and woe betide his friends, too-anyone who has had the misfortune to do him a good turn is targeted by the High Table as well. Once back in the city streets, John discovers that seemingly innocuous passersby are giving him the evil eye, as High Table emissaries.
John, who has taken refuge in a downtown Manhattan hotel called the Continental, a High Table sanctuary, is given a one-hour head start by its manager, Winston (Ian McShane), who is his friend. Oddly, the insular abstraction of its drama evokes-perhaps unintentionally-significant and terrifying real-world political crises.Īt the end of the previous film in the franchise, “ John Wick: Chapter 2,” the eponymous hitman (Keanu Reeves)-who, in the first film, was dragged back into mayhem after a puppy given to him by his late wife was killed-is the target of a contract held by the High Table, a grand international consortium of murder that’s managed at a teeming, Wes Andersonian office featuring chalkboards, rotary phones, typewriters, and green-monochrome C.R.T. It’s a true high-concept film, and, even when its particulars are evacuated without a trace, it leaves a chill in a higher dimension. Nonetheless, the movie-which features a screenplay that could have been written by Western Union and hardly enough fight-free scenes to fill a trailer-has a remarkable overarching conceit. The movie, directed by Chad Stahelski, a martial-arts expert and a longtime stunt performer and coördinator, expends great effort finding clever touches and novel twists in confrontations whose outcomes are all but inevitable: John Wick and anyone on his side will prevail, despite being absurdly outnumbered, out-equipped, and otherwise disadvantaged. “Interesting” isn’t a compliment it is what happens when filmmakers reduce drama to a technical problem that viewers are invited to observe being solved. “John Wick: Chapter 3-Parabellum” is almost all action, and its extended fight scenes range from numbing to repellent to interesting.
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