How 'Chapter 4' finally allowed John Wick to make amends
The assassin with a soft spot for dogs needed a real way "out" of the red.
When we first met John Wick, he was a grieving widow who had just lost his “way out.” That was his wife, Helen, a character that influences the story so much without ever stepping foot into it alive. At the funeral, John looked like a guy who won the lottery only to have someone tell him it was all a dream.
What Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves built was a lean and mean story about a longtime hitman who kills his way out of the profession, so he can marry Helen and settle down. He accomplishes this, but Helen gets sick and dies from cancer. Her dying wish, though, was leaving John a puppy to give him some companionship and ward him off from reentering a world of crime.
I’m sorry, Helen, but that didn’t happen. The dog was cute, but Russian thugs randomly entered John’s world at a gas station and upended it. Later that evening, the thugs beat up John and kill his dog. Stealing his car was the cherry on top of a stack of brutal vengeance that would soak up four movies.
While being an exhilarating, game-changing action showcase, Stahelski’s saga is the ultimate pillage of good intentions. A hitman gets out of the game to live a quiet life, and only finds it to get more noisy. After avenging the dog and taking down a good chunk of the Russian mob in New York, Wick goes back home only to find an old Italian rival requesting a marker. In other words, a deadly favor.
*SPOILER ZONE ALERT*
The third and fourth film deal with ramifications for Wick breaking sacred house rules at the end of Chapter Two. Every major country has a hotel named The Continental, a place that houses killers on assignment as well as the executive staff that reports to The High Table, the government body-type organization that contracts all these psychos.
Killing anyone, even on a job, is forbidden on Continental grounds. In essence, at the end of the 2017 sequel, Wick breaks the rules. After fulfilling the Italian dipshit’s marker and evading all of the “cleaners” sent after him by the same guy, John plants a bullet in his head in the lobby for final measure. Then, he goes on the run… for basically two movies.
But he broke the rules, causing a mess and for the few friends he has in the world (like Hiroyuki Sanada’s Japan Continental manager and Ian McShane’s American Continental manager) to lose people closest to them and find their own flesh threatened. John did this knowing full well what the consequences meant.
It’s one thing to be pissed about an immature Russian mobster ripping apart his already-sutured life, and going off on a tangent. But the shooting on Continental grounds sets off a chain of events, and John has to answer for that somehow while staying alive.
In Chapter Four, Caine (the great Donnie Yen) is introduced into the film saga as the hitman dispatched to kill Wick once and for all. It’s too bad the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard) didn’t know that Caine and Wick are longtime, if estranged, friends. They duel and go toe-to-toe in a handful of scenes, but neither really wants to kill the other. Business is just that, but the friendship and loyalty still abides between them.
*BIG TIME SPOILER WARNING*
At the end of Chapter Four, Caine and Wick literally duel at sunrise in a famous spot in Paris. McShane’s Winston, a longtime ally of John’s, found a loophole in the High Table order that allowed for a challenge to be made. Marquis and Wick face off for the latter’s freedom, but the former calls on Caine to take his spot.
They draw weapons and fire three times, hitting each other in areas that don’t immediately cause significant harm--at least not in this cinematic world. By the end, Wick finds a way to get the best of the Marquis by fooling him into thinking he had fired his round, when he actually didn’t. Doing so caused him to be hit in the side of the torso by Caine, but got his real enemy close enough to plant some lead between his eyes.
Here’s the catch. By killing the Marquis, Wick bought his own freedom, as well as the freedom of Caine. Early on in Chapter Four, we find out that he’s estranged more personally from his own daughter, doing jobs for The Marquis to pay down a debt that included his own eyes being taken.
Wick and Caine were two men who are too good at killing to live ordinary lives, but two women did their ultimate best to keep them out of the game. By taking the bullet and not killing Caine in their duel, John was able to make amends for causing the chaos of Chapter Three and Four. Maybe it doesn’t bring back his friends who paid the ultimate price to see him make it through (RIP Charon and Shimazu), but it allows one of them to still live a life with the woman he loves.
Now, anyone who has seen the film knows Caine faced his own stiff test to survive the end credits of Chapter Four, but my feeling is that he got out of it alive and with his daughter. Being able to sit down and appreciate her beautiful musicianship live with her knowing he is there would be enough even if it only lasted a day.
That’s what John gave him in that duel: a way out for both of them. A way to make amends for a life’s worth of taking life. In the end, he renewed someone else’s life.
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