Metacritic reviews

John Wick: Chapter 4’s incredibly staged set pieces, engaging ensemble, and stylish production design coalesce into a modern action masterclass.

Pure power, John Wick: Chapter 4 is as exhilarating as it is exhausting. With this wildly satisfying world tour de force, Reeves’ Wick transcends icon status delivering the perfect bone-crunching crescendo to one of the great action franchises in cinema history. It’s pure gold.

If more world-building, bigger action, and a deeper embrace of what its leading man does well all perk up your ears, you know what you need to know. As someone who has been in the tank for these movies for nearly a decade now, the fourth film is everything I wanted out of these movies. Yeah, I'm thinking he's back.

Bigger, badder, bolder, longer, and featuring nearly more spectacular set pieces than one movie can comfortably handle, this epic action film practically redefines the stakes.

Even when it drags — 169 minutes is a lot of time to fill, even for this masterful crew — the film gamely mixes comedy, action, and drama into one truly satisfying cocktail.

As Wick carves a path of stoic destruction across several continents, the series' longtime director Chad Stahelski, once Reeves' Matrix stand-in and longtime stunt coordinator, gets down to the business of what he loves best: creative kills, far-flung zip codes, and incalculable body counts.

More turns out to be just about right in this case, with the film offering up such an onslaught of brutal, breakneck action that it’s easy to forgive its less compelling narrative excesses.

Watching John Wick: Chapter 4 sometimes felt like watching an above-average assembly cut. At an unwieldy two hours and 49 minutes, your eye will immediately be drawn to what cuts through the noise — and there are plenty of these moments. But “moments” does not a well-told “movie” make.

In the gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.

Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.