After seeing John Wick 4, which is already a certified box office hit at a time when few people actually go to the movies, I got online to see what people were saying about the film because, well, I had a feeling my reaction to the movie was different than most. So I went to the social media film review site Letterboxd and poked around a bit.
In theory, democratizing a historically pretentious profession such as film criticism should yield some interesting results. In practice, gamifying film reviews with “likes” frequently results in people reducing in-depth critical analysis to vaguely puerile koans designed to get likes. And lo and behold, one of the top reviews on Letterboxd of John Wick 4 is a pithy rave masquerading as a nearly perfect indictment of the film: “I can’t wait to finally lose my virginity so I can say that this was better than sex.”
Indeed, the problem with John Wick 4 is that it feels like an anti-social incel gamer was locked in his room with whatever the 18th iteration of the visual artificial intelligence platform Midjourney is going to look like and spent a week typing in detailed prompts to make the action film of his stunted dreams. Maybe John Wick 4 isn’t actually a film produced by AI, but it perfectly captures the zeitgeist of a world on the cusp of producing Keanu Reeves movies actually created by The Matrix. It is a pinnacle of human achievement where one struggles to
