John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum

Reeves and Dacascos's brutal, climactic sparring session definitely leaves us wanting more, not to mention wondering about a potential Oscars sound editing category for shattering glass.

Choreography is all that's on offer here. The increasingly convoluted fight scenes turn into lifeless spectacle in this ugly franchise.

Superior exercises in action-movie formalism, the John Wick movies evoke everything from Fritz Lang's silent thrillers to Gene Kelly's musicals...

It's rather like when Bond films went from Sean Connery to Roger Moore. Plenty of people will find this copacetic. A few will grouse about what's been lost: a touch of the real amid the merely fantastic.

[I]t's a fun, entertaining romp that knows it's ridiculous from the moment that Wick takes out a towering 7-footer (the Philadelphia 76ers' Boban Marjanović) by beating him to death in a library with a book.

While "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum" is an easy movie to recommend, it must be added that it's a hard movie to love.

When a bruised and bloodied Keanu Reeves rides through a rain-lashed, neon-lit New York atop a literal dark horse to fight motorbike-riding fellow assassins, it's as brilliantly ludicrous as you've come to expect from the John Wick series.

To call this a high-octane actioner is an understatement so stark it's like saying Mel Gibson is slightly problematic.

Thanks to returning stunt-coordinator-turned-director Chad Stahelski, the film has no shortage of spectacular, breath-taking stunts and fight sequences to keep things moving once they kick off in a richly understated opening few scenes.

[T]he synthesis between those in front of and behind the camera rarely feels lost. It's perverse, beautiful, and brutal... and it rarely seems to last that long.