northernpaladin Reviews

The Fall Guy (2024)

Empty and Soulless

[4/10 · 21 May 2024]

This should have worked, Gosling and Blunt both have definite screen presence, they have both done light comedy, romance, serious and action yet they just can't make this work. Despite the obligatory 'we all love each other' vacuous Hollywood interviews there is no real chemistry here which makes the delivery fall flat. Now that probably isn't helped by a wafer thin plot and the erratic direction of David Leitch who hasn't made a decent movie yet except maybe (and it's a stretch) Atomic Blonde; we really have descended into the rabbit hole when talentless former stuntmen can have millions of dollars thrown at them by studios to 'direct' a movie when all they are doing is their old job of stunt coordinator with someone adding a few lines of dialogue in-between set pieces to kind of stitch it together. If you want something to wash over you for two hours while you drink beer and eat crisps then be my guest otherwise don't bother.

Monkey Man (2024)

Just more revenge trash

[3/10 · 29 April 2024]

At it's core this is nothing more than a bloody revenge story wrapped up in religious symbolism and political imagery. Many have referred to it as an Indian John Wick knock off and yes it does have many of the same tropes, a high body count, grotesque methods of death, endless bad guys obligingly queuing up to be dispatched one by one, a hero who can sustain multiple wounds, etc. The addition of religious iconography makes it a bit different and the background of an extreme political party might be Dev Patel commenting on modern India but if he is the message is lost amongst the violence and religiosity. The basic plot of young boy growing up to avenge his murdered mother amidst the corruption and squalor of modern India is nothing new just a different locale. The kinetic violence and buckets of blood is laughable these days as is the choreographed fight scenes - no-one fights like this. For most viewers the paper thin plot will tear pretty quickly and quite frankly The Raid does this kind of Asian frenetic fight mash up much, much better. At two hours this was 30 minutes too long, only watch if you've got nothing else better to do.

Sugar (2024– )

If The Guardian hates it you know it'll be good

[8/10 · 7 April 2024]

I admit I have a soft spot for private detective drama's whatever the time frame and this looks to be a good one. The genre relies on a strong male lead with some kind of vulnerability and Colin Farrell as Sugar completely embodies the requirement. All the cool you expect from the genre is on display, the car, the suits, the neon, every box ticked. The plot conforms to all the requirements, wealthy man hires private eye to find granddaughter, money is no object, all is not as it seems, dark secrets, etc. The directorial style and cinematography really lift this piece and the referencing to classic noir enhances the look. We're only two episodes in so it could go badly off the rails but as I say, if the reviewer at The Guardian hates it then it is going to be good.

Road House (2024)

What the...?

[2/10 · 28 March 2024]

Jake Gyllenhaal is a fine actor and I can only assume he had some debts that needed to be cleared up for him to appear in this worthless tale of a disgraced UFC fighter taking on a job as a bouncer in a bar under threat from a small time hood and corrupt sheriff. The Patrick Swayze original is not great but compared to this worthless piece of garbage it suddenly seems like one of the greats from the 80's. There is no part of this way too long failure in film making that works. The wafer thin backstory for Gyllenhaal's character doesn't stand up to a minute of scrutiny and the attempt to paint him as a western hero via a book store owner completely fails. The dual female leads played by Daniela Melchoir & Jessica Williams as so thinly drawn as to be nothing more than tropes and neither actress has the skills to make more of what they've been given. On the bad guy side the biggest joke is the casting of Connor McGregor as the psychotic heavy; this man should never be let in front of a camera again, it was excruciating to watch, not quite so bad was Billy Magnussen as the boss and rounding it off was the sad sight of Joaquim de Almeida as the corrupt sheriff, an actor of once high profile roles. On the directing front Doug Liman has some serious work behind him the original Bourne film most notably but he can be erratic and here he is definitely erratic; fight scenes are amateurish and predictable as well as being completely unbelievable, the camera is all over the place, there is no solid editing and the plot continuity is almost non existent. Please don't watch this, all you will do is waste two hours of your life.

Masters of the Air (2024)

Mawkish faux history

[4/10 · 15 March 2024]

The main problem with this is its billing as the Band of Brothers of the air; it isn't and never could be, the men of Easy Company were together on the ground for the duration of the war losing men along the way but the core group remained, the pilots of the 100th are not together because of the horrendous losses so we get no sense of a close knit group. The series starts well enough with our photogenic band of pilots who we easily bond with and some exciting aerial footage which works well but by episode 4 it has run out of juice, I only stayed with it because I have an Apple subscription so why not? The reason it doesn't sustain the interest (and by episode 8 it is a slog) is because the interesting characters are gone; dead - Barry Keoghan as Biddick, prison camp - Callum Turner & Austin Butler as Bucky & Buck both of whose further adventures are just plain tedious, transferred out - James Murray as Harding and we lose the dog! To sustain our interest we have the very wooden Anthony Boyle as Crosby (who also supplies the leaden narration) whose story arc just isn't interesting even when spiced up by a short lived affair with a female British agent (well played by Bel Powley) which just peters out as a story line, we also have Nate Mann as Rosie Rosenthal whose real life story is interesting but Mann's performance just isn't up to it. Then we have the inevitable messing with the facts without purpose; we have the hackneyed portrayal of British pilots as a bunch of stuck up toffs when we've known for a very long time what nonsense this is, it's almost as if Spielberg & Hanks are stuck in a time warp, we have the all Germans are Nazis lazy trope throughout the series, because it's Spielberg we have to have a holocaust reference, this time a rescued downed pilot wandering into an abandoned death camp without supervision just to make a point, we have Crosby & Rosenthal discussing the horrors of war (Crosby never flies a mission), in fact we have use of language that firmly belongs in the late C20th, oh and of course we have a clutch of cute kids wandering unsupervised around an air base. We also of course have to have the diversity and inclusion tokens for the modern audience but they are obvious tokens, the Tuskegee pilots story has been better told elsewhere, here it is pure tokenism, the strong female trope, as played by Bel Powley, could really have worked but it is allowed to wither on the vine and you do ask yourself why it's in a series about bomber pilots. As the series progresses it gets more and more tedious, like they'd run out of ideas, episode 8 is embarrassing and 9 is one long prison camp crawl and the crime of it all is that a quick Google search reveals how the real characters were way more interesting than their depiction. Honestly, if you are going to watch this, switch off after episode 4, you will have missed nothing else of interest. One final point, kudos to Austin Butler for still looking like a matinee idol after two years in a prisoner of war camp 🤣

Shōgun (2024–2026)

What a bore!

[4/10 · 28 February 2024]

I've not read the book and I've not watched the original mini series so I have no legacy investment. I watched this mainly because of the trailers and because of Hiroyuki Sanada's presence. First, the sub titles and English masquerading as Portuguese, if this is your problem then maybe you need to have a word with your inner racist. The sub titles aren't a problem it just means you have to watch and listen rather than being on your phone, as to English standing in for the Portuguese that would have been spoken, well good luck finding the audience that will endure subtitles for both Japanese and Portuguese speech. No, the real problem with this is the unfathomable plot strands and the central notion of a washed up English trader/pirate being important in a Japanese clan war. Non of the plot makes sense and the script is excruciating and no amount of bowing and being inscrutable can save it. A number of the players will be familiar to western audiences, the aforementioned Sanada has been in a lot of western productions, Anna Sawai & Takehiro Hira are both in Monarch, Legacy of Monsters, and Tadanobu Asano has a number of western productions under his belt, so this isn't amateur night. Unfortunately their lines don't help them deliver a coherent story and Cosmo Janis as the white saviour 'lead' further hampers things with a fairly uninspiring performance. Only two episodes have dropped so far but they were enough, I'm out.

On an historical note, in 1600 Spain & Portugal were one kingdom ruled from Spain and the threat to their trade came from the Dutch (it wasn't called Holland!) not England.

The Boondock Saints (1999)

Amoral murder porn

[3/10 · 23 February 2024]

Quite how this is perceived as a cult classic is beyond me. For the first hour it kind of works, there is a level of humour, a madness, some neat visuals and of course Willem Dafoe. However the amoral pseudo religious epiphany that drowns the narrative for the remainder of the film is really quite objectionable. Add to this the awfulness which is the acting of Della Rocco (I cheeredwhen his character died), the choppy direction, the insanely bad plot (super hired killer Billy Connolly seen chained in a super max prison is suddenly on the street killing people), gunfights in which the "good guys" get barely a scratch despite a literal hail of bullets and a twisted morality which has zero justification and you have an utter waste of an evening. I watched this because of its cult status, don't make my mistake.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024– )

Unfunny sociopaths

[4/10 · 6 February 2024]

There is a real problem with a TV series or movie when a five minute cameo is the best part the work and that is exactly what happens here, Alexander Skarsgard and Eiza Gonzalez absolutely smash it out of the park as John and Jane (but not THE John and Jane) in the opening scene from episode one and after that it's downhill all the way. The first big problem is the lack of chemistry between the two leads, Glover and Erskine have nothing going on and that is reflected in the totally unreal arc of the characters. The second big problem is the pace, SO SLOW and with no payoff for that slowness, no character development, no reveals, literally nothing. The biggest problem however is the concept, two complete strangers with some kind of background in the military/intelligence world are put together by a bizarrely secret/corporate organisation, are shown to be pretty average at what they do, yet are completely OK with blowing up a houseful of people for no reason other than it's the mission and putting the body of a man they have killed in a composting machine. The casualness of this is definitely sociopathic; the collateral damage of the bombing is shrugged off - pretty sure the staff were just ordinary working stiffs, and after the composting they have rampant sex despite having known each other for a couple of weeks and automatically become "an item". This show has some serious problems, it's not funny, it's not "ironic", it's soulless and even the make belive world it has created it makes no sense. Avoid.

Expats (2023–2024)

Excruciating

[3/10 · 27 January 2024]

A vacuous empty story about empty vacuous people in an empty vacuous city. One paced stilted direction drags the piece along at a snails pace with barely discernable dialogue which is incomprehensible even when you can hear it. The plot, such as it is, goes nowhere and at two episodes in I was utterly bored. None of the characters are remotely likeable and the acting is pedestrian at best; Kidman gives another of her now oh so familiar dead eyed facially paralysed performances that make you yearn for the actress that promised and delivered so much. Watching this reminded me of that wave of 70's avant garde theatre productions where all of the first act was spent staring out of a window or waiting for a letter to arrive. This is pompous pointless 'art' masquerading as film, don't bother, I've already wasted two hours.

The Lost City of Z (2016)

Long, dull and boring

[4/10 · 22 January 2024]

I often wonder why film makers feel the need to take a real life exciting story and make it unexciting and factually inaccurate into the bargain. The story of the explorer Percy Fawcett is pretty dammed amazing in a time of exploration which gripped nations yet this is tepid sludge. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the performances of Hunnam, Pattinson and Miller but they are saddled with set pieces in which to utter speeches rather than a connected story line within which we see the characters grow. This is not helped by Gray's leaden direction which crawls along with no discernable purpose and the late introduction of the vacant Tom Holland just increases the leaden pace in the final half hour. This could really have been something, sadly it wasn't.

Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023)

Dull Nonsense

[4/10 · 18 January 2024]

If you're going to make a drama about an historical figure then at least get the history a bit right, even if only a little bit. There were no black soldiers in the Confederate army, the Confederates lost at Pea Ridge, Reeves was freed, he farmed in the Indian Nation until 1875, etc. Just to get a flavour of how bad this is, in the opening episode Reeves, an officers man servant and slave, charges an artillery line with his master and shoots two soldiers from horseback with a rifle, an almost impossible task and then later when on the run fast draws a pistol out of his pants pocket and shoots three armed men dead. Guess what, slaves weren't taught to use weapons for fairly obvious reasons! This is total nonsense and doesn't need to be because the real story is pretty dammed interesting. From an acting perspective it's just dull, a series of set piece speeches full of C21st philosophy that takes us nowhere. Avoid.

Saltburn (2023)

Dark

[8/10 · 29 December 2023]

Emerald Fennell delivers another stunning directorial effort, this woman is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps not quite as tight as Promising Young Woman - there are a few too many plot holes, but the ability to present what looks like one thing - a parody of the English class system and then turn into a dark version of itself is a real skill that we should applaud. The basic plot of working class wannabe (Keoghan) desperately seeking the approval and friendship of golden posh boy (Elordi) is a tale as old as time and for the first third of the film that is what it all seems to be about but once he gets an invite to spend the summer at the posh family mansion a more sinister tale starts to unravel with shocking reveals. All the cast are first rate, Keoghan in particular is on fantastic form and eats up the screen and Elordi and Pike give strong nuanced performances. Not for the faint hearted but bloody good cinema.

The Killer (2023)

And......?

[5/10 · 16 November 2023]

In short this is a triumph of Fincher's style over Fassbender's acting and really that's it. Also the plot is fatally flawed; a professional assassin has a job go wrong due to a split second of mis timing and escapes to his Caribbean retreat via a long circuitous route only to find his housekeeper/life partner (it's never clear) horribly beaten and abused as some kind of message/retribution from his unknown client. This then propels us into the long slow search for the perpetrators and their employer and exacting of revenge. The flaw is (and this is the spoiler) why did his employer (not the client) think that attacking the girlfriend of a professional killer in his own home was a vaguely sensible thing to do, especially when in a later confrontation scene that employer expresses the view that the killer would not have come home and just disappeared into another identity never to be found? So why go to his home and abuse the girlfriend? Makes absolutely no sense. On the plus side, Fassbender's internal monologue as he goes through the monotony of tracking down the guilty and elaborately covering his tracks entices you into his world and showcases Fincher's stylistic approach to film making but by the end it's all a bit boring and as the credits rolled I just shrugged my shoulders.

Bodies (2023)

Utter twaddle

[3/10 · 2 November 2023]

I got two episodes into this and gave up. None of the characters or their actions are believable and none of the various time & place locations work. Of all the characters the modern day female moslem detective is probably the best drawn as is the world building around but that's not saying much given it's the here and now. The Victorian and WWII characters are thinly drawn and their worlds are a C21st liberal revisionist view of what they'd like those times to have been, clean, racially integrated, empowered minorities, etc. The futuristic vision is just another V for Vendetta rip off, some domestic terror act led to the collapse of democracy and the installation of some kind of benign dictatorship watching everyone. Maybe it gets better but two episodes are enough, I'm out.

The Continental (2023)

Garbage

[3/10 · 25 September 2023]

Oh my god this was so bad I couldn't even finish the first episode, just so clichéd, so badly acted, so badly choreographed. I enjoyed the original John Wick but the franchise declined with each successive film both in terms of credibility and performances except, ironically, Ian McShane as Winston. In this mess we have the young Winston flailing around in a very bad pastiche of 70's New York, involving himself in a barely credible plot revolving around his brother stealing the coin press that makes those cool coins of the High Table. The Continental is managed by Mel Gibson, who is the only watchable actor in the whole thing, and who, surprise, surprise, has a black sidekick just like the films - groan. Virtually every character we meet is a bad version of the characters we used to see in 70's cop dramas and black exploitation movies, the soundtrack is a confused rag bag of 70's hits from virtually every genre available and New York looks like a post apocalyptic film set - if you wanted a decent blueprint take a look at The Warriors. All the things that are a problem with the films are here and magnified, the excessive violence, the sheer volume of gunfire that never hits anyone important, the fey cool, the toxic masculinity, the fetishisation of death, the invisibility of the law and the warped idea that a league of assassins is somehow a good thing. Even if you are a John Wick fan and even if you thought the 4th film was any good just don't bother with this you will only be disappointed.

Master Gardener (2022)

Measured and pleasing

[8/10 · 10 September 2023]

Thank god for intelligent film making. This story of second chances and redemption is not without its problems but overall is time well spent if you actually want to watch a story unfold. The basic plot of bad man atoning for a past life through enabling others is a well worn furrow which usually ends in an orgy of violence or a tragic sacrifice but not so here. In Edgertons measured and nuanced performance we have a far better and more realistic journey as he demonstrates once again how underrated he is as an actor. Sigourney Weaver demonstrates just how damm good she is and relative newcomer Swindell holds her own. If I were to critise it would be the continuity and editing, at times I was left thinking that a scene was missing and some of the linkage plain didn't work, thankfully the overall arc of the story and the performances kept me interested enough to let the flaws slide. Give it a watch.

Major Crimes (2012–2018)

Just not good enough

[5/10 · 6 September 2023]

Thanks to the marvel of streaming I had the opportunity recently to re-watch The Closer and appreciate how good it was, apart from the somewhat disjointed final season, so I thought I'd give Major Crimes a go. Now it's not a disaster but neither does it reach the regular heights of The Closer and after 3 seasons I had to give it up. On the plus side the team has much more to do and is not trailing around after the bosses coat tails as they tended to be in The Closer; G. W. Bailey as Provenca leads the squad as he would do and the character and the episodes benefit from it, also Raymond Cruz as Sanchez has more to do and his flaws are well played, the introduction of new girl Sykes played by Kearran Giovanni works and isn't just an inclusion tick box exercise. The negative side however outweighs the positive; the most obvious is Rusty Beck probably the most annoying character ever played in a police procedural drama and after 3 seasons I still couldn't work out whether that was because Graham Patrick Martin is a poor actor or the script he was given was written by someone with no clue about teenagers/young males; much ink has been spilt about how annoying the character is but of far more importance is the ridiculousness of his involvement in every single episode where his 'drama' distracts the viewer from enjoying the episode and the absolute unrealistic character arc of having Captain Raydor as his legal guardian and then being adopted by her as if by magic with no repercussions - watch the adoption episode and ask yourself just how creepy the whole damm thing is. Which brings us neatly to the next big negative and that is Mary McDonnell as Captain Raydor; this character worked well enough as a foil to Brenda Johnson and as an ally in the final series of The Closer but that character in charge of an elite squad of detectives just does not fly and as the series goes on her criminal insights become increasingly farcical. This is not helped by McDonnell's performance which is largely given in a flat monotone and the 'emotional' scenes are false and unbelievable; maybe the unfortunate resorting to botox and the such which seems to be the go to for older actresses accounts for the lack of facial expression, who knows. There are other problems, the super villain status afforded Phillip Stroh, the cringeworthy 'comedy' episodes and the nonsense of a Captain ordering around completely independent departments of the (squeaky clean) LAPD like SIS and SOB but ultimately I couldn't take any more of the Rusty Beck/Sharon Raydor love in so be warned.

Ahsoka (2023– )

You're kidding, right?

[3/10 · 29 August 2023]

If you enjoyed the animated series and thought this would be a great way to respect and expand those characters then you are in for a huge disappointment. The animated series were not perfect but they did create believable characters, had the strong female leads that every programme is falling over itself to create (badly) nowadays, had plotting that worked, pretty OK dialogue and actual character development. This sad contrived monstrosity has none of that, the first episode is a 20 minute too long slog fest where only stupid things happen and really nothing else. By the end of the second episode you just feel sorry for the actors spouting cringeworthy dialogue and meandering around a plot which makes no sense. Enough! Just don't watch.

Lioness (2023– )

What?

[1/10 · 19 August 2023]

I should have known better. Another piece of Taylor Sheridan male fantasy, flag waving bull that appeals to the "America is Great" brigade. Not a blink as we set off on yet another US elite unit out to murder America's "enemies" just because someone sat in a comfy office said so in a deep and serious voice but this time with the added titillation of an all female unit masquerading as female empowerment. All the characters, including Soldana, are flat and one dimensional, the opposition are cardboard cutout villains with not an ounce of commonsense and the plotting is ludicrous; send a rookie operator into an Arab terror organisation who can't speak Arabic, classic. Just another pile of trash from Paramount and Sheridan.

The Sixth Commandment (2023)

Below parr effort

[5/10 · 12 August 2023]

This is all a bit of a bore really, a plodding dramatisation of a couple of unremarkable murders by an unremarkable psychopath in an unremarkable English village. The much vaunted performances by Reid and Spall are no better than they've given in the past and they've given better, Annabel Scholey, as the niece who makes the connection, gives an equally good, if not better, performance. Obviously, in such a story, there can be no car chases or shoot outs but the plodding pedestrian pace does nothing to excite or even move the audience and I was only half engaged and extending what is really a 3 episode piece to 4 did nothing for it. I can't honestly recommend this but clearly others really enjoyed.

SEAL Team (2017–2024)

Garbage

[3/10 · 11 August 2023]

This is just a wet dream fantasy for Boreanaz, playing a role he is too old for and would never be anywhere near in real life, but hey, wave the flag. As to the actual character, yet another can do rugged hero type who breaks the rules because he knows best who would not last five minutes in the military particularly an elite unit like the Navy SEALS where sticking to the mission is pretty dammed important when you are in places you shouldn't be. In the first two episodes alone I think I counted half a dozen protocol infractions and incidences of putting the team in harms way which just would not be tolerated nor would a soldier suffering from PTSD who refused psychiatric help be put in command of a team. Then we get the utter nonsense of the team jetting off to Syria or wherever for a high octane mission and they're back to wives and girlfriends the next day for barbecue like nothing happened, no debrief, no de compression, no nothing, utterly unbelievable. The acting? Non existent. The direction? Plodding. Dialogue? Cringeworthy. Now there are plenty of 9 & 10 reviews on here and I can only assume these are from those who genuinely believe that the US has a god given right to interfere in any other country's internal workings and that having an elite team of government killers is a good thing but Russians, Chinese, Iranians or Syrians doing the same is a bad thing. This is blatant hijacking of the entertainment industry to do obsequious flag waving and it sucks.

Old Henry (2021)

Solid Western

[7/10 · 21 July 2023]

As a fan of the genre but having cringed at some modern efforts like the awful 1883 I went into this with some trepidation but what a gem. The film is made by Tim Blake Nelson as the dirty, worn, farmer with a hidden past which he is forced to resurrect when trouble comes a calling. Already sounds like a cliche? Well yes it is but in this incarnation it works a treat and the film barely misses a beat as the truth of the man's past is revealed slowly and almost accidentally. The cinematography is excellent and the mood of scratching a living in early C20th Oklahoma where the 'west' is still a tangible memory is well captured. All in all an evening well spent. Recommended to all lovers of realistic westerns without modern messaging.

Reminiscence (2021)

Solid futuristic noir

[7/10 · 15 July 2023]

Part Inception, part Minority Report, part Strange Days, with a hefty dose of 40's noir, this tale of murder, love and the importance of memories amidst a drowning world is, for the most part, well played. The leads, Jackman, Ferguson & Newton give solid performances and the realisation of a drowning Miami is excellent giving a very real look at a possible future. The basic idea of being able to access and replay memories via a kind of immersion tank therapy is believable enough and its use for law enforcement as well as personal pleasure dovetails into the narrative fairly seamlessly. The murder mystery, which is the core of the story, is straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novella, which is fine, but occasionally looks a little forced within the future world depiction. All in all though a solid watch and worth the effort. PS. Ignore the, "it's boring" etc reviews, these people wouldn't know a good film if it ran them over in the street!

Secret Invasion (2023)

Terrible

[2/10 · 30 June 2023]

I'll admit my hopes weren't high going in given the steady downward spiral which is the MCU but this exceeded all my expectations in a bad way. I barely got through the first episode of flat, boring, dialogue and artificial tension as various left overs from MCU plot lines that went nowhere are given artificial life here. Jackson is well past his sell by and although the series tries to play up to that fact as a plot positive it only succeeds in emphasising how irrelevant Jackson has become. Mendehlson is an actor of serious talent but that is totally wasted here and Smulders just looks desperate as she reprises a role (yet again!) that she should have left alone several iterations ago. What is striking is how lucky Emilia Clarke was with GOT because she clearly cannot act. Please don't give this trash validation by watching out of some loyalty to franchise that has since spat on your forbearance, find something decent to watch.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Thank God It's Over!

[3/10 · 14 June 2023]

I enjoyed the original movie, it had a story that worked within a graphic novel kind of way, the action was believable, there was character development, some decent performances, all boxes ticked for an above average action film. From then on however there has been a steady decline, culminating in this awful, barely watchable mess, featuring no story, unbelievable action, zero character development, and dialed in performances. The 'story' such as it is (really just a series of badly scripted contrivances to segway from one fight scene to the next) features yet another autocrat from the High Table pronouncing doom on Wick and all those that associate with him (again!) which heralds the expected ridiculous bloodbath taking place amongst civilians and police who barely notice punctuated by high sounding pronouncements from the protagonists that finally fizzles out after a mind numbing three hours - I'm so glad I didn't pay to see this! You could say the violence that follows is just what you expect from a John Wick movie except it's not; the fight choreography is slow and laboured like the stuntmen are waiting for Keanu to catch up, the combination of guns and swords just looks stupid and even the execution of the idea looks awkward, the trope of throw away bad guys literally lining up to fight the hero was laughable but forgivable in early Hong Kong action flicks but here is an utter cringe and repeated way too many times - the Paris steps section is a case in point, too long, too stupid, too unbelievable. Add to this the bizarre idea of armoured henchmen carried over from episode 3, which didn't work then either, plus ballistic office suits which give us the nonsensical vision of actors flipping up their suit jacket tails to protect themselves from gunfire like they are trying to avoid a rain shower! Laughable. The thinly drawn characters are perhaps the worst aspect of this debacle; Reeves as Wick clearly decided at 3 that he didn't need to bother and has regressed into the performance style that everyone criticised him for in his early career, minimal effort, dead eyed delivery, no emotional connection, just simply turn up, mouth some word salad, leap about and take the big fat cheque. But that's not all, the blind assassin trope from so many other films is done so badly here, nothing Donnie Yen does is remotely believable, again, bad guys line up to be knocked down, the choreography is sloppy, the actual character is so thinly drawn that a student in their first year of writing school could have knocked something out that was far more believable and there is zero chemistry between Yen and Reeves who are meant to have been best friends now tragically pitted against each other. Then we have Shamier Anderson as 'The Tracker' whose sole reason for existence seems to be to turn up at random moments to intervene conveniently and have plot exposition conversations with several of the protagonists, we know nothing about him, he has no arc and by the end know nothing more about him. By far the worst drawn and worst performed character is 'The Marquis', chief villain and opponent to Wick; this character makes no sense, he appears from nowhere with ultimate power and ultimate resources, inhabiting a faux C18TH world in plain site, literally blowing up hotels with no repercussions and yet has zero screen presence which is solely down to the insipid, boring and affected performance from Bill Skarsgard, why oh why would you cast a Swedish born, American based actor to play a French man badly? There are loads of good French actors out there who could perhaps have made this character work. Of the minor characters, Laurence Fishbourne turns up with nothing to do and Lance Reddick is treated abysmally but Hiroyuki Sanada does shine as the honourable samurai friend role and makes the most of a typically thinly drawn character. Top marks however go to Ian McShane who has taken a peripheral role and made it very much his own, acting everyone off the screen and being the only positive thing I could take away from this mess, thank you Ian. Ultimately me giving a film a bad review will make zero difference, people will have been ripped off at the box office, much money will have been made by the studios and rich people will be even richer, all I can hope is that someone takes notice and doesn't waste three hours of their life streaming it when they could watch something far better.