Last Wick Best Wick?

The question I hear a lot is: Is John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) the best of the series? I may answer that later. I will start with a quick synopsis, quicker than usual, because who needs it?

It starts with Wick (Keanu Reeves) in the desert, killing the Elder of the High Table. As he is told repeatedly, this will not change anything for him. Sure, but the Elder will be dead. That has to count for something. 

The (new?) Marquis, Bill Skarsgaard, shows up at the NY Continental, and excommunicates Ian McShane. Also, he kills concierge Lance Reddick as a lesson to McShane, and blows up the hotel. Reeves, after being helped by the Hobo King Laurence Fishburne, heads to the Osaka Continental, run by Hiroyuki Sanada and his daughter Rina Sawayama. Again the Marquis' men show up, lead by blind assassin Donnie Yen. Sanada gets killed and the hotel gets blown up, but Reeves escapes. 

Killing the Marquis isn't going to solve Wick's problems, but if he makes it a duel, it might. But he needs to be sponsored by a family, and he burned those bridges. He asks to come back in, and they will allow if he kills Scott Adkins, a sort of goofy Russian (German?) with steel teeth. Mission accomplished.

Skarsgaard accepts the challenge. The time and place are set - Paris, the Sacre Coeur, dawn. Now, Reeves just has to get there in time (against every assassin in Paris) and defeat Skarsgaard's champion, Donnie Yen, Reeves' old friend.

As usual, there are some amazing fights. The battle in the Osaka Continental takes place in a sort of exhibition hall. When Reeves crashes through a glass case of swords, you might see a resemblance to the case of knives in Wick 3. There's a big gun battle using incendiary shotgun shells that's ridiculously fun. 

And speaking of ridiculous, Reeves has to fight his way up the hundreds of steps to Sacre Coeur at the top of Montmartre. He gets up and is tossed down again and again, like the stairway fight in Wick 2, times 10. 

So the fights hold up - as good or better than the other movies in the series. But the rest of the movie is based on the formalistic rules of the assassin underworld - they make it all about the rules. That's fine, but I don't think it's the "lore", the world building that we care about. Can't say it bogs things down much, though. It does allow for a nice final battle - one on one pistol duel.

So I'd say for now, not the best in the series. For me, probably John Wick 3: Parabellum. But we'll have to watch them all again to see. That will be in preparation for Wick 5 - which we fully expect even though Reeves is killed in the end (SPOILER - or is it?).

Sadly, we won't see Lance Reddick as the concierge as he has passed on. Since we didn't watch The Wire, we were late in becoming his fans. We will miss him.