Chante, goddess, of the wrath of John Wick, widow of Helen and defender of canines. Like Homer’s famous first line Iliad, who starts with a request to the muse of epic poetry to tell us about the wrath of Achilles, all four John Wick films begin and end with the wrath and vengeance of one man: an assassin-protagonist named John Wick. The body count is high, but Wick, played by Keanu Reeves, has more affability and sweet talk than the ancient Greek hero ever mustered. And as in previous films, familiar tales of Greek and Roman mythology abound in this supposedly final chapter of the cult series. In the newly released film, Wick embarks on an odyssey through museums and monuments from Tokyo to New York, from Berlin to Paris. The nearly three-hour film was meant to wrap up our own 10-year journey with the sympathetic assassin.
At the start of the first film in the series, John Wick (2014), the killing of a beagle given to Wick by his now deceased wife, Helen, launches the proverbial 1,000 ships. This modern Trojan War is waged by one man against a global network of assassins in a criminal underworld overseen at its apex by a group called The High Table. The eponymous hero, once a famous hitman, comes out of retirement to exact revenge for the death of his dog and recover his stolen car. Along the way, viewers encounter a number of supporting and important characters who help Wick on his journey. Friendship and chosen families are ultimately the keys to Wick’s motivation and quest. Foremost among these characters is hotel manager Winston Scott, played by Ian McShane, who runs the New York Continental Hotel. In reality, it is the Beaver Building in New York. Each continental hotel in different cities around the world, from Tokyo to Rome, is managed by a manager and a concierge. These hotels resemble ancient Greek temples or later Christian churches, each of them extended a concept called ἀσυλία (asylia) — more commonly known as “sanctuary” – to those who needed protection from attack. As in antiquity, these hotels-refuges offer regulated spaces for thieves and saints alike to abandon their weapons and sleep in complete safety on neutral ground.
Throughout all four films, Winston is assisted by a caretaker named Charon, a loyal guide and protector of the assassin’s rulebook. Charon is played by the recently deceased Lance Reddick. It looks like Reddick has been filming scenes for the Wick spin-off Ballerina before he died, which leads me to believe that this won’t be his last John Wick appearance. As Winston and Charon remind us, this network of outlaws is guided by a strict code. Among these alleged criminals, decorum and hierarchies reign, just like in the outside world. And in this underworld you will need a guide. In Greek mythology, Charon is the name of the ferryman of the underworld who navigates the Acheron and Styx rivers. In John Wick: Chapter 4Charon dies for protecting Winston and Wick.
His unjust murder at the hands of the film’s main villain, the Marquis de Gramont (played by He‘s Bill Skarsgård) comes at the start of the film as retribution for Winston’s protection of Wick in John Wick: Chapter 3. After his death, viewers are taken to the designated cemetery for assassins in New York. As a grim Winston talks to another assassin called the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), viewers catch a glimpse of one of many great epitaphs. Inscribed in Latin with the words of the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Elder, it reads: ‘Vivamus moriendum is‘: “Let us live – we must die.” Charon dies so others can continue to guide Wick through his own underworld. It is only later that Winston tells us that the epitaph Charon commissioned simply read “friend”.
Although the anger rooted in the history of the Iliad appears throughout the films, it is the Odyssey which provides the narrative framework for Wick’s journey. In a interview with Variety, the director of John Wick: Chapter 4, Chad Stahelski, noted that he loves Greek mythology: “I believe in storytelling and leaving it. You know, we’ve always seen John Wick as Ulysses. First, Wick travels to Morocco to kill a member of The High Table and thus reignite old animosities and the bounty on his head from the previous episode.. Like Odysseus, Wick’s return will now require a visit to the underworld as well as trusting a blind prophet. This modern-day Tiresias is in fact also an assassin, a man named Cain (Donnie Yen), who is tasked with killing John Wick as part of a deal with The High Table to protect his daughter.
And yet, in this chapter of the Greek saga, Wick shares the role of Odysseus. A tracker for rent played by Shamir Anderson is a bounty hunter who, whenever asked his name, replies “Nobody”, in a nod to Odysseus who outwitted the Cyclops. In a series of selfish maneuvers, Anderson’s character and his German Shepherd repeatedly protect Wick while increasing the bounty on his head. We first meet “Nobody” in the lobby of the Osaka Continental hotel – which is actually the National Art Center in Tokyo – where Wick goes to seek refuge. Here, Wick searches for his friend, hotel manager Koji Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), assisted by his concierge and his daughter, Akira (Rina Sawayama). Vengeful girls are featured too briefly in this film, especially Akira. As one of the three goddesses of revenge called the Furies, the Erinyes who served Hades, his mission is to avenge the death of his father, who is brutally killed while defending his friend.
When the film is shooting in Berlin, we finally reach the bowels of the Cyclops’ cavern, watched over in the Odyssey by a Cyclops and son of Poseidon named Polyphemus. Wick is told that because he had been excommunicated from the assassins’ syndicate, he must join a crime family in order to reenter the underworld and legitimately fight the Marquis in a final sunrise duel to gain his freedom. In an attempt to reintegrate such a family, Wick interrupts a Russian Orthodox religious service actually held within the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart. He then meets the new head of the Ruska Roma family, named Katia. Another of our Furies; she, too, needs revenge and proof of death before she can allow Wick at her request.
With Wick’s entry into the church, we realize that Christianity – with all of its aesthetics and symbolism surrounding redemption and resurrection – has entered the chat alongside classical mythology from antiquity. Wick is sent by Katia to kill a villainous assassin named Killa Harkan whose office appears to be in the middle of a rave in the notorious Berlin neighborhood. Kraftwerk nightclub. Rather than the sheep of Polyphemus, we now have sheep that dance to electro and ignore the intense combat around them. As fate and Homeric foreshadowing dictate, Killa is killed and a gold tooth is used as proof that Wick is worthy of rejoining Ruska Roma and thus the families that provide the beating heart to this social network of criminals.
The ways in which just revenge could be transformed into freedom is the guiding perspective of John Wick. But the meaning, the modalities, the price of this freedom are always at stake. In the opera then in the supposedly civilized space of the museum, we soon visit our villain, the marquis. The empty halls of the Louvre Museum in Paris serve as our synecdoche for the ills and triumphs of humanity. And lying on a suede sofa between the red walls of the famous Salle Mollien, our antagonist stares at the film by Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading the People (1830). The painting commemorates the overthrow of King Charles X during the July Revolution of the same year. The painting focused on a classically inspired allegory of Liberty leading the people through a barricade with her tricolor flag. Winston Scott, now the former manager of the New York Continental Hotel, arrives to meet the Marquess and to work out the terms of the duel that could secure John Wick’s freedom from the tyranny of the High Table. We must not lose sight of the viewer that we quickly see the work of Théodore Géricault The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819), which uses classical imagery to depict a disastrous French shipwreck off the coast of Mauritania in 1816. Wick’s quest for freedom may end in freedom or death.
Modern versions of the Roman triumphal arches from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to Paris’ Arc de Triomphe abound in the film’s background, but like a Roman general who is not yet victorious, Wick must remain at their periphery until victory. It’s only in the final scenes that Wick walks through the arches, particularly those on the facade of the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur in Paris. But before he can even reach them and the setting for the final duel, Wick has one last stand with the assassins trying to stop him from his final fight. In a battle that rages up and down and then back up the infamous 222 steps of Montmartre, Wick must rely on allies, friends and a certain German Shepherd. Between the Parisian steps and the shots of the basilica above, I really thought Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was going to play in the background, but the sound editors were a bit more subtle than the set.
Our epic Greek story alongside Wick and his many companions ends with an ancient μονομαχία (monomachy) — one-on-one battle — in front of the basilica. And like a true Ulysses, Wick fights with intelligence and power. I’ll leave the end result a mystery, but in the final minutes, the confrontation with the Marquis begins in a duel that’s also dualistic: good meets evil, all within the confines of the assassin’s creed. As the sun rises, Wick’s freedom is on the horizon. But will he get it? Will he be freed from the underworld and escape the bounty on his head to find redemption? You must embark on this engrossing, worthwhile, cinematic odyssey into the underworld yourself in order to find out. Any advice from Orpheus? Do not look back.
