JOHN WICK: KAPITOLA 4 is the current culmination of the journey followed by the former hitman John Wick in 2014, who no longer has anything to live for and thus leaves at least a lot of dead behind. Really enough. Like really a lot. Probably the most of all the so-called chapters, of which this is by far the longest: after the third, which exceeded two hours, the fourth is almost three hours. Keanu Reeves, actor of Wick, and Chad Stahelski, director, they firmly state that this will be the last episode… for now. However, the series will continue to grow as a spin-off is created Ballerina with Ama De Armas in the title role and the series The Continental, which will be about a hotel for killers. Reeves and Stahelski thus completed, at least temporarily, the collaboration that began with The Matrix, in which Reeves played the role of Neo and Stahelski was his stunt double.
“I can’t wait until I finally lose my temper so I can say John Wick 4 is better than sex,” wrote one commenter on Letterboxed. However, critic and historian Marie Barešová is not ecstatically excited about the film: “For me, the series has a downward trend. The fourth chapter felt unnecessarily stretched, set up, predictable in many ways, with an unnecessarily flashy pre-camera scene and a more leaky script,” he shares his impressions. And he adds that he was pulled out of the immersive audience experience by the fact that “Wick’s immortality is harder to believe, because in the parallel world there are a lot of killers waiting to collect the large bounty on John’s head. In addition, the actions do not follow smoothly, the opponents wait for the hero to fight someone, which in some places could not be overlooked,” he elaborates on his criticisms. It seemed to her that the Wick movies were turning into Bond movies: “in an adventure that takes place in several world destinations.” Maria – despite the “perfectly choreographed action scenes that combine shootouts and physical fights” – lacked the intimacy of the number one. It was about a retired killer being killed by the dead woman’s dogs, so he kills them.
Marek Slovák disagrees, on the contrary, he perceives John Wick: Chapter 4 as “the peak of certain (neo-baroque) tendencies of Hollywood audiovisual. It is a sheer joy of the spectacle, a sensory experience, thanks mainly to the colors and movement. In addition to being lavishly built to show off how ornate and beautiful the pre-camera space is, the work is based on referring to inspirational patterns: Italian spaghetti-westerns, Japanese samurai and gangster flicks, American rough school, etc. Here we have the character of a blind killer, which reminds of the blind samurai Zatoichi, with whom a good twenty films were made, and alludes to the director Seijun Suzuki, for whose gangster exploits the decoration, beauty and opulence of the environment were paramount,” Marek mentions why this action cut can be enjoyed by a more educated audience as well . Moreover, unlike Maria, Marek was never overwhelmed by the rush of action, because “there is always a way to distinguish it from itself. For example, by slowing down, situating in club interiors and driving with dance music, or on the contrary by focusing on exteriors, accompanied by more popular songs and alternating gun-fu (fights using weapons), car-fu (fights using cars) and even video game action in the house.”
Action movie expert Marie awards John Wick: Kapitola 4 slightly above average 60 %Marek 90 %which is not at all, really not at all, of course not related to the fact that she has a worse sex life than Marie.
Medea vs. Dust
Michal Samir made his feature-length debut as a director and screenwriter with the club film Hany, seemingly shot in one take. Romantic comedy BE A MAN!, which Samir wrote and filmed as his second effort, can appear as an effort to attract a larger audience. Similar to when Adam Sedlák attempted the youth thriller BANGER after the festival apartment horror/marriage drama Domestik. Did Samir’s genre film turn out like the vast majority of domestic so-called lifestyle “romantic” comedies, in which the crew doesn’t even bother with the basics, because they know that viewers without basic requirements will come to it anyway, and add the necessary chauvinism, homophobia, etc. as an extra? In other words, did it turn out like in the Czech Republic with everything?
Marek thinks surprisingly not. “Be a man! it goes against a number of stereotypes that are the norm in genre film attempts here. If there are gay people in the picture, they are not just secondary supporting characters for the main couple. If masculinity is addressed, it is not a parade of chauvinism and a celebration of toxicity (like The Tiger Theory), but it shows that masculinity can take many forms. If we get from the city to the countryside, i.e. to nature, a simple opposition is not created as in the vast majority of works from the time of the Protectorate, but on the contrary, the emphasis is placed on the symbiosis between urban and rural,” states what Be a Guy! distinguishes it from its genre companions in a good way. Samir’s directorial competence also stands out: “We thought about how to tell the story with images and (almost) without words, as evidenced by the opening montage. How to light the scene atmospherically. How to compose the shot and place the characters in it in the pre-camera space, how to cut things so that the individual lines are connected thematically,” Marek pauses over what is common abroad, but unfortunately still an exception to the rule in our country.
Even with regard to the above, Marek would rate Be a man! above average 80%, if the Czech context should be considered, 60-70%if he should also take foreign competition into account.
Marie and Marek in Ball Lightning! they dissected not only the pair of titles presented above, but also two very successful documentaries (Visitors and Kuciak: The Murder of a Journalist), so listen to them in podcast applications.