The Continental: Aus der Welt von John Wick

To take the excellent, years-built, almost flawless world of John Wick and fill it with this unoriginal and generic shit, it takes talent. Because Hotel Continental can't even hit average in one respect. Either through boring characters, both on the bad guys side (where no one is worth mentioning and Mel Gibson is an NPC) or on the "good guys" side (where no one is interesting enough or has the required background or charisma), or through extremely boring filler, or, last but not least, through terribly boring action that doesn't even come close to Wick's, where the cinematography follows the usual style, but doesn't stand out and there is no dynamics, choreography or brutality at all. So I actually ask myself, why should I rate it higher? Since in almost five hours of (tedious) running time I haven't found a single good thing, a single memorable scene, a single good action sequence or character that I'll remember tomorrow, it's amazing how relatively well this garbage is rated. To screw up the best action franchise of all time like this deserves a lifetime ban from making anything else. Boring. (09.08.2024)

The John Wick universe, where cool gunslingers shoot headshots and perform gun-fu, just like John Wick, in a dark visual stylization like John Wick. The production design is properly neo-noir and the soundtrack is full of bangers. The only problem is that John Wick himself isn't even there for a minute, and the characters that are "in his place" are either completely generic with no appeal or have too little space. The only reliably workable link is Mel Gibson as the alpha bad guy. There is no need for another spin-off like this and an attempt to create a Wick world. (02.12.2023)

A return to the concept of the first two John Wick films, which I honestly am not a fan of. The whole saga began to interest me only with the third installment, which definitively leaned towards an action blockbuster, where the sequence of shootouts or fights made more sense and where there was no lack of humor lacking. And it was precisely the humor that was most often provided by the character of Winston, who was desperately lacking that perspective in his youth. I don't need attempts at lines from fake tough guys, a period hit interrupted three times before it starts again in a moment with the chorus, and I certainly don't need cheap titillation with blaxploitation that serves no purpose. The result is an anonymous shooter with overly contoured enemies, a bunch of genre clichés seen a hundred times before, and at the very end even multiple instances where all logic or previous internal rules are completely ignored. (10.10.2023)