The John Wick series...so far (ugh)

I watched them all because projectile vomiting would have occurred had anyone told me that the second and third installments were soooo much better. And right, Chapter 2 is the best of the series. It had to be better than the first, so shoddy that I started strawmanning about my preference for hardcore pornography.  Hollywood is supposed to offer tense narratives over porn's thin pretexts and dull action. But the storytelling in what is now retroactively known as John Wick: Chapter 1 is so inept that I had to check Wikipedia to see if John Wick actually killed Viggo, the main villain, at the end. And why bother fleshing out Wick's precise relationship with The Syndicate of The Council of Twelve or The High Table or whatever when a sequel can pick up the narrative slack? I did love, however, when right before the climax Viggo's perpetually beleaguered henchman sees Wick in the rear view mirror and says, "Goddamn, I knew he'd come!" Hey, me too!

But the excruciating boredom I experienced when watching these films got me thinking about Ara Osterweil's perceptive quote about the relation between porn and the avant-garde: "Whereas the boredom of pornography seems to derive from its uninterrupted and sustained fullness, the ennui of the avant-garde is often generated by the lack (or perceived absence) of narrative event or conventional character development" (453).* So it comes down to which fullnesses we allow ourselves to experience. The John Wick series is full: endless fights (or "choreography"), shopping sprees for weapons, sound effects amplified such that a door closing sounds like a dumpster dropped from a skyscraper, etc. But its fullness services two venal tendencies in American thought: a conspiracy-cured belief in totalities like The High Table and toxic individuality. The moral: There is a Council of Twelve that controls everything with intricate, narrative-drenched codes of conduct that must be adhered to but you, individual, can break those codes. And trust you'll get a sequel that "justifies" your transgression. 

That these ideologies have led to Trumpism makes the John Wick series important on sociological grounds. But it's definitely not my idea of a fun Saturday night, especially since the body count in these films already rivals the Friday the 13th series (proposed law: every murder in a Hollywood film must be accompanied by a one-minute history on the person murdered). And John Wick is only marginally more compelling than Jason Voorhees. His motivation growing ever more cloudy the further the series moves away from his dead wife and dog, he remains a self-serious dullard throughout. The only thing I could possibly want from His Taciturnity is a one-night stand. And therein lies my preference for hardcore pornography. 

As far as the folly of treating these films as individual units, I like Chapter 3 the least because the fights take up an appalling amount of screen time, generating a lack of narrative event suitable for cat napping. And it ends on an even more egregious cliffhanger than Chapter 2 which means this is a television series that will be with us for as long as Keanu Reeves' bones hold up. Nevertheless, I loved Administration, "an organization that stores killer files, processes orders and distributes them," according to the John Wick Fandom page. Staffed mostly by women who resemble 1940s gangster molls updated with copious tats and piercings, Administration is where the series finally becomes ridiculous. This is the excess space where the totality is made flesh. Crucially, it's not mentioned in any of the plot synopses on Wikipedia. As such, it's both narrative-drenched and non-narrative. I like to think the women find all the machinations of the High Table preposterous and are just waiting for their weekly check. And I dream of Lily Tomlin's Ernestine taking over management and pronouncing John Wick "ExcommuniKondo."

John Wick (Chad Stahelski [who?], 2014) - C

John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski [him again?], 2017) - B

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski [hmm], 2019) - C-minus

John Wick: Chapter 4 - Parallelogram (Chad Stahelski, 2022)  

John Wick: Chapter 5 - Paramecium (Chad Stahelski, 2025) 

John Wick: Chapter 6 - Perineum (Chad Stahelski, 2030) - I predict this will be the best.

*Osterweil, Ara. 2004. “Andy Warhol’s Blow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-garde.” In Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams, 431–360. Durham and London: Duke University Press.