John Wick

Only a few short years ago, I was a professional bartender working for Michelin-star chefs in fine-dining restaurants and, eventually, serving the social elite in five-star hotels. Most of the known names were genial. Killer Mike and El-P of Run the Jewels were gentlemen. So too were Thundercat and Anderson .Paak — who were particularly keen on my margaritas. Some night porter friends anticipated trouble when they heard Nicki Minaj was staying, but found her to be extremely down to earth, pleasant and normal. Others, however, were not.

It looked like it was finally going to happen. At last night's Academy Awards, after a fun back-and-forth with Emily Blunt, Ryan Gosling — who stars with her as a stuntman character in this year’s The Fall Guy — said “We’re here to celebrate the stunt community. They’ve been such a crucial part of our industry, since the beginning of cinema.” In a subsequent video, narrated by Gosling, paid tribute to the best of stunts work for the past hundred years, showing clips from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to John Wick, Fast & The Furious, RRR, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Matrix, Mad Max: Fury Road and more.

For anyone of a certain age who grew up in the Eighties and Nineties, there was always a wistful feeling that persisted whenever a big-budget blockbuster came out. The likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis were often seen slaughtering (usually foreign) villains and dispensing manly quips. But why did they never team up to do so together? Was there not the possibility that, one day, a veritable Dirty Dozen of Hollywood hard men could be assembled to kick ass, take names and (perhaps) compare notes on agents’ fees, too? Well, Stallone himself was not deaf to the pleas of action-loving cineastes, and so his 2010 film The Expendables was an honorable attempt to make exactly this sort of film.

Fourth installments of mega-franchises don’t exactly have the greatest reputation — just think of The Phantom Menace, The Matrix Revolutions, Live Free or Die Hard and Jaws: The Revenge, to name a few. By this point, film sagas are usually bogged down by their own internal mythologies and find themselves replaying familiar beats in a bid to recapture the magic. But every so often, there’s that Mad Max: Fury Road, an utterly unexpected burst of wild creativity that outdoes its predecessors. And John Wick: Chapter 4 is such a triumph. As Chapter 4 begins, legendary assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is at odds with the High Table, the governing authority of the assassin underworld.