THE STORYTELLING was effortless, the stunts and cinematography nearly flawless (after all, it is a John Wick supersequel) and the entertainment value, to borrow from Vice Ganda, unkabogable (hard to top).
Personal backstory to the movie : I never expected to watch a first-run, just-off-premiere-night movie so soon, as a toddler’s parent it was nearly unthinkable. But we’d just come off night shift, Mahal said I deserved it, I’d just seen reissues of JW2 and JW3 on Netflix, and to be honest, the Keanu Reeves-Chad Stahelski collaboration was viscerally addictive on the primal level. The movie-night voucher clinched the deal. So so for the first time in at least a decade, I watched a movie alone in a near-empty cinema.
To say John Wick : Chapter 4 is a formulaic movie is like saying mountain air is clean, or that spring water is drinkable. It embraces every aspect of the noir thriller-action movie-assassin/international crime family genre, so that it, by fusing all of the latter, has become a genre all to itself: looking for John Wick movies? Look under the “John Wick” section.
From the title’s premise, the movie can’t help but build on the previous three. The John Wick legend, canon and philosophy is a story that needs to be brought to its natural conclusion, not that we’re tired of all the sequels but you get the point. You watch the movie without any presumptions, and neither does the movie at any time come with any pretensions (although the kill count does get a bit over-the-top video-game-ish,even for the franchise). John Wick is a hired killer, the best there is. Not by choice, but John Wick has chosen to fight the system that created him. John Wick will kill everyone on his way to his goal, or will die trying.
[ Fun Fact : Keannu Reeves, although he is in 99% of the movie, speaks less than five minutes of lines, most of it “Yeah,” and quite a few non sequiturs. ]
You don’t even need to digest the last three sentences, just the italicized phrases are enough. And unsurprisingly, that’s what the movie will give you, so that when you think about it, the movie is actually spoiler-proof. You are thoroughly entertained, and yet you know what will happen from start to finish.
So we reach the inevitable : what’s the point blogging about it? And here it is. My favorite hero, the Pinoy migrant, is a bit like John Wick . He is a product of the system, thrives in it, but hates it. He wants to get out, and to a certain extent beats the system, (by leaving) but never in his heart leaves the system. Being part of the system is in his blood, and despite the many years and jobs away from what he truly is, he will keep coming back, and will eventually be consumed by the system.
At the risk of belaboring the point : John Wick is born into a crime family, your garden variety hired killer who becomes exceptionally good at what he does, so that he spins off into his own brand, a transnational assassin with no weaknesses who nevertheless operates under the High Table, the international crime group that oversees all criminal activity worldwide. He burns bridges and kills relationships (literally) but because his skills are peerless he dictates his terms and because of the assets he acquires from his skills, gets to retire early.
Except that he can’t. He has become a victim of his success, and through a series of misfortunes keeps getting drawn back to the world he is obsessed with leaving. To make a long story short (four movies long, in fact), his conscience and principles require him to give “payback” to those who keep pulling him back into crime, and in short to tie loose ends. He is a killer with a golden heart, and that golden heart, well…
The Pinoy migrant has usually done well back home. But in varying degrees he/she hates the environment that has given him/her his/her skills and gifts, and these he/she will use to leave the system. Through the years overseas, he/she develops an internal struggle that prevents him/her from truly abandoning the Motherland: physically or otherwise he/she keeps coming back, keeps finding ways to help people back home, or even give back to the country he/she left so unceremoniously.
In the end, the Pinoy migrant’s internal conflict is all but unresolvable. In space and time, you have been away for so long, but in your heart and mind, you’ve never left. We are all balikbayans.
In a way, John Wick, like all Pinoy migrants and OFWs, is the eternal balikbayan. And we Pinoy migrants are all John Wicks.
Thanks for reading!
