The “John Wick” franchise has just returned to life with “Ballerina,” starring Ana de Armas as a Ruska Roma dancer who trains as an assassin to avenge the death of her father. But even if the series’ producers hadn’t come up with the genius idea of making a spin-off movie about a killer who puts the brutal pow in plié, the “John Wick” series would still be coming back to life.
At CinemaCon in early April, it was announced that Keanu Reeves would be returning to star in “John Wick 5.” That might have come as a surprise to anyone who saw “John Wick: Chapter 4” and watched as the title character got killed off in what seemed at the time to be the most dead-as-a-doorknob way possible. That movie, which might have been called “John Wick — The Final Wreckoning,” was explicitly designed to showcase the end of Wick’s reign of mayhem. And the timing felt right. The series had stretched on for nearly a decade, and “John Wick 4” was close to three hours long. Like a marathon round of Mortal Kombat or the trench warfare of World War I, the series had piled up more than enough of a body count.
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But, of course, somewhere in the back of your reptile moviegoing brain, you knew that John Wick was going to have to come back. Because how could it be otherwise? No movie franchise today is going to leave its hero on a slab if it means leaving money on the table.
In the last five years, there have been several high-profile precedents for this. At the end of “No time to Die,” the James Bond series conjured a twist of singular gravitas when Daniel Craig’s Bond chose to sacrifice himself to save the world. Yet it was a bit laughable when the movie, having made the momentous decision to kill off 007, followed that cataclysmic event with an end title that read: “James Bond will return.” Talk about having your shaken-not-stirred martini and drinking it too!
Then, of course, there’s Superman, who died at the end of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” only to return to life just in time for “Justice League.” And there’s the Avengers, several of whom disintegrated before our eyes when “the snap” brought “Avengers: Infinity War” to its suck-in-your-breath conclusion. Outside the theater, however, in the light of late-capitalist Hollywood day, you just knew that it couldn’t last, that Peter Parker and T’Challa would have to come back.
In movies, you can trace the trend of what we might call Death Lite back to the moment in 1978 that established the if-it-makes-money-bring-it-back paradigm: the “death” of Michael Myers at the end of “Halloween.” He gets shot six times and falls off a balcony, lying on the ground, joining the ranks of half a century’s worth of movie monsters who are destroyed by the forces of good. Seconds later, though, he is gone; his body has vanished. In essence, that one moment set up the entire arbitrary nature of movie sequel culture. You can draw a direct line from the return of Michael Myers to the resurrection of John Wick, all done in the name of fan service.
But why does it feel like all this ritual undercutting of killing is killing us? You might say: What’s so bad, really, about taking characters who are this beloved and bringing them back to life? In a sense, nothing. Yet the subtle cumulative effect of it has been to create the sensation that a movie no longer has a true beginning and end, that it lacks what the Greeks called the dramatic unity of action. In Old Hollywood, movies had that; in the New Hollywood of the ’70s, they had it as well. But the death-that-isn’t-really-death syndrome feeds the perception that movies are now, more and more, just a perpetual blob of time-killing, with nothing at stake. And that has an insidious way of sanding down the inner morality of pop culture, and maybe of our society. In fact, I’d argue that all this “miraculous” resurrection has begun to raise the question: If death in the movies is no longer permanent, if it no longer means anything, then does anything mean anything?
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The post No One in the Movies Stays Dead Anymore appeared first on Variety.
