John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

The real technical difference here is that Stahelski hands much of the violence to animals. Trainer Andrew Simpson prepared five Belgian Malinois for the Morocco section, Santana and Tai in the lead and three as doubles, after five months of rehearsal in a Los Angeles warehouse. Halle Berry joined in the third month and broke three ribs there. Tad Griffith drilled Reeves for over a month at his Santa Clarita ranch, supplied an Arabian called Rogue trained to kick on a voice command, and ran three horses at roughly twenty five miles an hour beside the motorcycles. What that buys is a shift in what impresses: the thing you admire is animal handling rather than gunplay, and the camera holds its shots long enough to prove nothing was fixed afterwards. The shape of the film is lopsided, though. The opening half hour is one unbroken flight from library to antique weapons shop to stable, with almost no dialogue; in Casablanca the story stops and the rules of the High Table are explained at length. For: anyone who cares that fights are staged with real animals in long takes. Not for: anyone troubled by long sequences of trained dogs mauling people, and anyone wanting closure, since the film stops mid sentence and hands everything to the next chapter.