As any fan knows, Mr Wick is a dog lover. It was the murder of his puppy that started this whole story. That dialogue, extensive for him, comes at the end of one of the best fight scenes in this third, and I think best, instalment in this neo-noir thriller franchise, which has been a critical and commercial success.
All three movies are directed by former stuntman Chad Stahelski, who brings his old job to almost every vividly shot, viscerally choreographed and very violent scene. First-time viewers should note the MA15+ rating. It would be MA15++++ if such a rating existed.
This is a series in which the timeline is a thing of clarity and beauty. The previous movie ended with Wick being declared incommunicado by the High Table (a sort of House of Crime Lords) and having a $US14 million bounty put on his head.
Winston (Ian McShane), the manager of The Continental Hotel in New York, sacred ground that Wick violated, granted him an hour’s head start. John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum starts with the clock ticking off that hour and Wick racing through the rain-drenched streets of Manhattan, his devoted pitbull by his side.
The next two hours is Wick fighting off a global array of bounty hunters seeking the $14m. With the whole hitman world after him, what hope does he have? Winston sums it up well. “I’d say the odds are about even.” Parabellum more or less means “prepare for war”.
Winston’s line is typical of the deadpan humour that lifts this movie above an action thriller. I think the only time Wick removes his black tie is to stitch up his bullet wound. A gruesomely funny scene in New York Public Library proves Dante is no match for Russian literature.
The script (series creator Derek Kolstad leads the writing team) is excellent, especially when regular characters such Anjelica Huston’s Ruska Roma boss and Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King return to beef up the dialogue.
It is fascinating to watch this movie with, in the back of the mind, the recent stories about what a wonderful man the star is, including the one in The New Yorker headlined “Keanu Reeves is Too Good for this World”. If that’s true, and I don’t doubt it is, then the John Wick films show he is also a damn fine actor.
John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum (MA15+) 3 stars
National release
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WOMEN BREAK X-CEILING AS TIME WANDERS
The spoon-bending Magneto is my second favourite X-Man, after the Wolverine, and in X-Men: Dark Phoenix he does his best to ratchet some jokes into the story. But the funniest part, as it usually is in the X-Men movies, is not wholly intentional. It’s a timeline that is so twisted it makes Uri Geller look like a straight shooter.
The action unfolds in 1992 and Erik/Magneto, who we know from the earlier movies survived Auschwitz as a boy, is handsome Michael Fassbender, who was born in 1977. How he will ever age enough to become Ian McKellen, the original Magneto, is beyond even Charles Xavier’s brain.
The blue-skinned shape-shifter Magneto has a thing for Raven/Mystique, who must be at least in her late 40s. She’s Jennifer Lawrence, a recent graduate from young adult franchises such as The Hunger Games.
Then there’s the star of this 12th X-Men movie, Jean Grey/Phoenix (Sophie Turner aka Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones). I thought she died at the hands of Wolverine a decade earlier, timeline wise, in X-Men Apocalypse, but I may be mistaken about that.
Of course it’s best not to make too much of this. It’s just a movie about mutant superheroes and mutant or alien super-villains, after all. This incarnation is the directorial debut of Simon Kinberg, a writer and producer of four of the previous X-Men movies. He also wrote the script and in this sense he has a bit of fun making it more up-to-date than 1992.
It’s the women in the X-Men team who tend to save everyone’s arse, Mystique tells the aforementioned wheelchair-bound big brain in charge of the operation, Professor Xavier (James McEvoy). “You might want to think of changing the name,’’ she suggests.
And certainly this movie is all about a woman. Jean Grey comes back from a space rescue mission a changed X-Woman. Exposure to a cosmic force has pushed her powers off the charts.
Not even Xavier can read or control her mind, and this leads to the central tension: she finds out what he did to her when she first turned up, aged eight, at his School for Gifted Children. Mystique and Hank/Beast (Nicholas Hoult) are also questioning Xavier. They think it’s only to feed his ego that he is sucking up to the ordinary humans (he has a direct line to the president). There’s a good scene where Hank tries to make Xavier admit he is wrong that reminded me of Fonzie’s difficulty with the word “sorry” in Happy Days.
Jean, dubbed Phoenix by the mutant kids at Xavier’s school, starts behaving badly. “She’s all desire, all rage, all pain, and it’s all coming out at once,” is the diagnosis from Xavier. The police turn up, ill-advisedly, followed by the army, ditto. At this point there is a significant, not-to-be-revealed-in-a-review development involving one of the X-People.
Phoenix struggles with this force within her and seeks help from the once bad Magneto, who now lives in a peace-loving commune. But when Magneto learns of that significant development, help is far from his mind.
At the same time, an alien force led by the sexy Vuk (Jessica Chastain) is trying to capture Phoenix to steal her powers.
There are some interesting ideas at play — Xavier may be a bit of a bastard, women may be stuck under an X-ceiling, a key character may be with us no more, Magneto may have discovered the fountain of youth — but their culmination ends up being a rather straightforward humans v good mutants v bad mutants v aliens movie.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix (M) 3 stars
National release
The 47: Heartwarming film about a bus-driver on a mission
Spanish box office hit The 47 will have you cheering for a bus driver who wants to save a route for a disadvantaged community.
Queens come alive for an underground audience of the dead
Few rock bands can match the raw power and propulsive swagger generated by Queens of the Stone Age in full flight. A new concert film shows the quintet in a raw, delicate state deep underground.
“He shot my dog,” ex-assassin Sofia (Halle Berry) notes to assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) after she, he and her two belgian malinois wipe out about 1000 baddies. Wick nods. “I get it.’’