The little quips and nonsense faux-deep aphorisms in this 4th one were pretty rough and lent the movie a really slow start, plus I had a hard time remembering who anybody was. But the action scenes were fantastic as usual. I like that “person who fights with dog” is a recurring character class in these movies.
As everyone mentioned, the Hotline Miami scene was great. That firecracker shotgun is a video game weapon I’ll think about a lot. I also liked the frogger car dodging scene, you could really feel those cars whizzing by. And the staircase fight! Climbing the whole painful way up, then rolling all the way back down (huge laughter in the theater), and then having to fight all the way back to the top with the power of friendship. It’s the closest the movie comes to classic wuxia imo.
Weird ending. John Wick’s death came completely out of the blue for me. After the big climactic dual, he just sits down on the stairs to catch his breath and think about his wife. I’m zoning out a little, like, “oh ok time for emotional wife stuff” and then I clock back in and he’s DEAD! After all the man’s been through, he just slowly bled out from a gutshot on the stairs. Felt pretty anticlimactic, though I understand the emotional arc they were going for. I also note that they left it very, very easy to retcon if they want to bring Keanu back and just say he faked his death to get out of the game.