I mean, come on, seriously? We needed a colon AND a dash?
OK, sure, it's not the thing you take away from this movie but it was genuinely the first thing that struck us as the screening began.
Such trivial matters are soon forgotten, however, as the film gets underway and we join a wet Keanu Reeves jogging through the New York rain, trying to get somewhere by somewhen, dog at his side.
Such details are soon clarified as we discover that Mr Wick has been booted out of the Killing Klub for Reasons (you'll need to have seen JW2 for these to make sense), and as the countdown begins he's en route to going from hunter to hunted.
What follows is standard John Wick fair — stylish, outlandish fight sequences that are basically brutal ballet, all beaten out with tongues firmly in cheek.
And yes, the fight scenes are violent, but they're also fun. And in places, hilarious.
We laughed more in the opening 45 minutes than we have at most of the comedies we've seen in the past 12 months.
And Parabellum (the title is explained by the wonderful Ian McShane).....
(For reasons we're not too sure about, we got sidetracked while writing this — not a usual state of affairs for sure, and almost certainly connected to a bump in the old mental health road. Concentrating on something is a bit of a bugger when the brain isn't playing ball, and completing tasks becomes harder because that takes effort and not doing it is the easy option. Leaving what was going to be a fun, witty, engaging review gathering dust like Bradford's city centre after the financial crash of 2008. But we digress again. Onwards....)
The point we really wanted to make when we started banging on about JWC3P (seriously, who is naming these things?) was the ballet angle.
It's the thing that leaps from the screen, way before the point is laboured.
Each fight scene is beautifully choreographed, exquisitely timed, basically pure physical poetry — and it's these scenes that make the movie.
Sure, there's a plot. There are other characters (McShane is as good as ever, turns out Halle Berry wasn't busy, oh look Fishburn is back...), there are dogs, there are jokes.
And there's Keanu being all Keanu, not pretending to be young, fit and healthy, but a normal 40+ guy who has heard of the gym but was busy that day.
And this is one of the reasons the JW films are so watchable.
There's a middle-aged guy in a suit, getting out of breath and beaten up, but somehow coming out on top.
He rides bikes, drives cars, takes people out with a horse (a fantastically bonkers fight sequence), says stuff, hits folks, shoots a lot of people and ends up looking like we all would if we'd done half that.
Mind you, there's a reason the fight scenes are as good as they are.
They have to be.
Because away from the all the punchy-punchy shooty-shooty fighty dog horse bonanza, they try and add plot.
And this is where the wheels start to come off.
Between each set-piece, Wick has to Go Places and Do Stuff and See People, all of which is leaden and dull.
It's as if the cast, crew and writers don't care about it any more than we do, but feel obliged to chuck it in to fill out the running time (a daft two hours plus change).
I get that they thought maybe they should do something different this time, but they ticked that box with the horse.
No one wants plot.
The John Wick films shouldn't, by any rational measure, work — but they do, and that is down to Keanu and his totally believable portrayal of an assassin having a bad day.
We go and watch them to see endless fights, blood, limbs flying everywhere, and leave grinning like idiots because it's all such damn, dumb fun.
We just need a fast-forward button for this chapter.
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