Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee and Chad Stahelski   Director: Chad Stahelski    Screenplay: Shay Hatten and Michael Finch   Cast: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, Clancy Brown, Ian McShane, George Georgiou, Marko Zaror and Natalia Tena   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

Viewers who have savored the myriad dishes of stylish carnage served up in the previous movies of the John Wick series will no doubt rejoice at the chance to gorge on the prolonged feast provided by this fourth installment.  One action set-piece after another is trotted out in a seemingly endless splurge of colorfully choreographed comic-book violence designed to stun the senses and keep the adrenaline flowing, interrupted by expository scenes in which the increasingly complex “rules” of the Wickian universe are laid out, old characters are welcomed back and new ones introduced and flashbacks occur to remind us of things past, all accompanied by hokey sentiment or bursts of juvenile humor.  The result is a nearly three-hour orgy of mayhem that’s flashy, raucous, brainless and as nutritious as a Twinkie.  But fans will eat it up and, like Oliver Twist, ask for more.  Others might feel not just glutted by the excess but somewhat nauseated by it.

For those not up-to-date on their John Wick history, the protagonist is a legendary hit-man roused from retirement by violence perpetrated against him, his dog and his car in the first, and easily best, installment.  A glum, world-worn, laconic fellow despondent over the loss of his beloved wife (Bridget Moynihan), he’s gotten his revenge and survived, but at the cost of crossing The High Table, the organization of assassins to which he belonged and being excommunicated from its membership, the price on his head making him a lucrative target for all the other murderers in the age-old outfit.

Eliminating Wick is now the particular obsession of the new COO of the High Table, the preening, effetely French Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), especially after Wick kills The Elder (George Georgiou), the only man above the Table (whatever that means) in the movie’s first set-piece in the desert of Morocco.  The Marquis tasks Caine (Donnie Yen), a blind assassin as legendary as Wick, to take on the mission, despite the fact that Caine is an old comrade-in-arms of John; he agrees to the assignment only to protect his daughter, a violin prodigy, from possible harm. 

But Caine is not the only hunter on Wick’s case.  A great mass of Table associates lust after the bounty put on him, including the enigmatic Tracker, aka Nobody (Shamier Anderson), whose partner is a well-trained Belgian Malinois as much treasured by him as Wick’s canines have been by their owner.  The Marquis’ loyal lieutenant Chidi (Marko Zaror) is no slouch, either.

But Wick has a few allies.  One is Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), the manager of the Osaka Continental, a Table safe house, who gives him shelter despite the misgivings of his daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama).  Another is the seemingly unflappable Winston Scott (Ian McShane), the manager of the New York Continental whose hotel is literally demolished because of the special treatment he accorded Wick in the last picture.  And there’s the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), the erstwhile crime lord who’s been a sardonic helper to Wick since Chapter 2.

Eventually Wick’s chances of survival come down to his being able to arrange (and reach the location of) a duel with the Marquis (or more properly his champion Caine).  But that requires his being accepted back into his old Ruska Roma family now headed by Katia (Natalia Tena), who agrees only if he takes down Killa (Scott Adkins), head of the Berlin High Table.  Even after he succeeds Wick must evade hordes of assassins in Paris in order to reach the Basilica of Sacré Coeur de Montmartre, which requires ascending a staircase of more than two hundred steps against a gauntlet of killers, including Chidi—a feat he’ll need to accomplish not once but twice.  (Thankfully, he gets some unexpected help.)  The duel caps things; naturally it proceeds in a fashion designed to ratchet up tension and end in a surprising fashion.

Reeves grunts his way through each stage of the narrative, and shows considerable dexterity in the avalanche of action scenes, which are all choreographed extravagantly by stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski and his team in locales lavishly rendered by production designer Kevin Kavanaugh and shot with abandon by cinematographer Dan Lausten; but inevitably some of them (like the Osaka brouhaha)  come across as reminiscent of sequences from earlier installments in the series, and one of them—involving lots of vehicular traffic around the Arc de Triomph—is awfully messy, the visual effects not quite up to the task of keeping things clear.    

There are exceptions, though.  The ascent of the stone stairway at the end is impressively thought-out (though one imagines that it could have been made cheekier if the thundering score by Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard had been replaced with a recording of Stanley Holloway singing “Get Me to the Church on Time”), and one complex shoot-out, viewed from above, is especially intricate even if largely effects-based.  Even those sequences, however, are overextended, a failing that certainly afflicts the face-off in a wild nightclub with Adkins, encased in a fat suit and outfitted with gold teeth that make him virtually unrecognizable.  Nonetheless editor Nathan Orloff does his best to keep the movements comprehensible.

Apart from impassive Reeves, the cast go through their paces efficiently, though Skarsgård is a pretty dull villain.  McShane and Fishburne have their roles down pat by now, with the former’s aplomb particularly engaging, and Anderson makes an auspicious debut as a character fans will certainly want to see again—along with his dog.  Among the rest Yen carries his celebrated MMA mantel with humor and grace, while Lance Reddick is typically suave as Charon, the Continental New York’s concierge; his final scene carries special poignancy given his recent death.       

It’s obvious from “Chapter 4” (including add-ons in the final credits) that the ground is prepared not merely for further sequels, but for spin-offs, whether in the form of features or streaming series, or probably both.  Let’s just hope the multiverse will not get involved.

Producers: Marcos Kantis, Dries Phylpo and Giorgios Karnavas   Director: Vasilis Katsoupis   Screenplay: Ben Hopkins   Cast: Willem Dafoe, Eliza Stuyck, Gene Bervoets and Josia Krug   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

Willem Dafoe does a virtual one-man show in Vasilis Katsoupis’ sophomore feature about an art thief trapped for months without much food, running water or a functioning bathroom in a posh high-rise penthouse he was robbing, but as “Inside” grinds on, you might wind up feeling as much a captive as the protagonist is.  In part that’s the purpose of the exercise, but though you can admit that it succeeds in that respect, you might find yourself asking: Is it worth spending two hours on so suffocating an experience? 

You could perhaps feel differently if the script by Ben Hopkins managed to get inside the psyche of the thief, but while it employs narrative voiceover and some dream sequences as the thief’s predicament grows more and more desperate, it really doesn’t try.  Dafoe’s performance is impressive, but remains a surface portrait of panic drifting into increasingly sad resignation as attempts to escape repeatedly fail.  Frankly even Dafoe, as intense as ever, gets boring after a while.  It seems appropriate that according to the end credits the protagonist is named Nemo, because he has pretty much remained nobody throughout.

Or is he intended rather to be, in a way, a symbol of a particular kind of solitary man?  There’s one aspect of the guy’s personality that’s revealed early on.  Toward the start he recollects a school exercise in which students were asked what they’d save if they were caught in a house fire.  While his classmates mentioned family members, he’d chosen his cat, a cherished CD, and his sketchbooks.  But only the third proved permanent. “Cats die, music fades, but art is for keeps,” he says. 

The sentiment, alluded to again near the close, is clearly meant to serve as a key to what Hopkins and Katsoupis are after: their picture intends to be not a probingly “realistic” character study, but a reflection on valuing art over humanity, a dramatic test of Nemo’s pronouncement.  As the plot progresses, the fellow’s treatment of the art he’s trapped with becomes less and less solicitous, and by the end he’s destroying much of it, using bits of it to fashion his own “exhibits” and scrawling sketches on the walls.  He apologizes to the absent owner, but says maybe it’s a necessary process—the theory of “creative destruction” employed by some economics transferred to the world of artistic creation.

The question for the viewer is whether the film’s higher ambitions are realized, or “Inside” remains essentially a grim tale of a man trying to survive in a hostile environment—the ritzy apartment being merely the equivalent of a treacherous wilderness in which a person might find himself stranded (a hackneyed adventure-movie trope), with the museum-quality artwork curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and striking production design by Thorsten Sabel serving as modernist replacements in a hoary plot, the movie’s stand-in for snarling animals and threatening foliage.  The answer for one viewer, at least, is that the way in which the makers employ the various elements of the design—the paintings, photos, videos, displays, and even the set—is clever (if you’re sufficiently knowledgeable to grasp the allusions), but not enough to give their Grand Statement the profundity they’re aiming for.

The film does, however, grab your attention with a riveting account of Nemo’s getting into the apartment, whose owner has left for an extended stay in Kazakhstan, via helicopter and his hurried effort to collect pre-selected pieces by Egon Schiele from an extensive art collection while his confederate urges him on via a headpiece.  When the security system activates and locks Nemo in, his partner simply tells him he’s on his own and ends communication.  One wonders why staff and police don’t arrive to investigate, but the script simply sidesteps such matters to depict Nemo’s initial frantic efforts to escape a place more effectively outfitted to keep him in than it was to prevent him from entering.

The slick ostentation of the place is shrewdly employed to skewer the ultra-rich culture vultures who buy artworks that they then hide away from the vast majority of “vulgar” humanity.  A refrigerator that blasts out “Macarena” to remind one not to leave the door open too long is a nifty idea, and the uses to which Nemo ultimately puts the reflecting pool and aquarium of exotic fish are fitting, if obvious, elements of the commentary on the crass opulence of the lifestyles of one-percenters the film is at pains to convey.  The same can be said of Nemo’s destruction of much of the carefully-chosen designer furniture to construct a rickety tower he climbs to break through the skylight to freedom.

But other plot elements have a strange banality to them—Nemo’s attempts to connect with the outside world by observing building workers via CCTV (especially Eliza Stuyck’s housekeeper, whom he names Jasmine and longs to connect with, because she could prove his salvation in more ways than one) or his concern for an injured pigeon on the terrace, which he remains separated from by unbreakable glass are heavy-handed means of emphasizing how his rigorous commitment to art over emotional relationships is fraying under the stress of his isolation.

One has to admire the care with which Hopkins and Katsoupis attend to their chosen template, and the commitment that Dafoe, Bigazzi, Sabel, and the other craftsmen involved in the project, including cinematographer Steven Annis, editor Lambis Haralambidis, costume designer Catherine Van Brée and composer Frederick Van de Moortel, have devoted themselves to realizing their vision.

But in the end one is left wondering whether the artiness of “Inside” says as much about the pretensions of the filmmakers as it does about those of Nemo and the owner of the apartment he trashes.  After all, it’s just a more cerebral take on the sort of survival story told by “Man in the Wilderness” or “The Revenant,” pitched at the intellect rather than the gut, and in the end more contrived than compelling.