But the high table isn’t about following the rules, otherwise they would have concluded that Laurence Fishburne followed their goddamn rules and they had no cause to punish him. In their treatment of him, they reveal that what they are about is protecting power and privilege, not the rule of law.
-xtien
“Hey John. That was a pretty good fight, huh?”
Oh wow, there’s an ebook to go with it:
I totally understand your actual point about Reddick not being an action star, and Halle Berry clearly having done more training and preparation for her action work even if they’re both over 50 and only a couple years apart.
Amusingly, I first saw Reddick in The Wire too. Where he seems like a normal looking guy and then randomly you see him without his shirt in some scene at home and he’s ripped like some kind of super hero.
- The guided-missile dogs were awesome. That whole fight scene was just adrenaline-cubed.
- Halle Berry at 52 is om nom nom.
- Not grand guignol. More 70’s Street Fighter Sonny Chiba tearing off some guy’s nuts and then holding them up to the camera. Chinese giallo? Dunno.
Well, I will freely concede that you were paying closer attention*, but didn’t Larry Fishburne break the rules by providing material support to John Wick after he was declared persona non grata?
Are you just making stuff up? I honestly don’t know that much about what the heck the High Table is trying to do, other than let Said Taghmouai run around in the desert while Angelica Huston berates ballerinas. Are they just a generic assassins for hire company? Are they into banking? What about politics?
But where do you figure they’re “protecting power and privilege”? More to the point, how does that in any way precludes “rule of law”?
Seems to me the movie wants us to understand the High Table is all about rules and consequences. I mean, really, isn’t all this stuff just Generic Shadowy Organization 101? If you’re going to work for a Generic Shadowy Organization, if you’re going to take your paycheck from them for doing assassination contracts, maintaining hobo spies, or running The Continental Dog Kennel and Gold Coin Repository, you have to follow their rules. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have taken the job!
-Tom, #TeamHighTable
* Ha ha!
Nope, he wasn’t. What he did was provide material assistence when Santino took out the 7 million bounty on him. (As “revenge” for killing Santino’s sister, which Santino of course forced him to do.) But a bounty doesn’t make you persona non grata.
Which again, Laurence Fishburne did.
They’re not about rules and consequence, they’re about power, and how power manifests. If they were about rules and consequence, Iain McShanes’ power move wouldn’t have worked, and they wouldn’t have treated Laurence Fishburne the worst of the John’s associates for doing nothing wrong.
I’m not sure this is shown at all. One operative’s a homeless guy in an alley gaslighting John, the doctor who treats John doesn’t radiate affluence, the sushi guy doesn’t summer in the Hamptons – I just see the Table as a criminal syndicate with Illuminati-like arcane rules and symbols that we sort of have to guess at, created by stoned hacks winging it. But I’m still in. For now. Parabellum was no Glass.
Tom = Lawful good
Dingus = Neutral good
Kelly = Chaotic good
Haha!
Are you a True Neutral in this scenario?
-xtien
I know what most of those words mean, but not how they’re supposed to fit together. I’d probably have to rewatch John “Oathbreaker” Wick 2 a second time to understand what you’re saying.
So what rule did Larry Fishburne break that they were relieving him of command? Are you saying he was just being arbitrarily punished in John “Not Good for His Word” Wick 3? I seem to recall The Adjudicator had some sort of formal charge, didn’t she? Or am I misremembering?
Again, I don’t see any support for this in the movie and I’m not convinced they were just arbitrarily deposing Larry Fishburne. But if that’s how you want to imagine The High Table so you can sleep at night knowing that you support a lawless world where oaths don’t matter and people can break rules with impunity so long as they look good in a suit with a cool dog at their side, that’s fine. But there’s no suggestion in the movie that the High Table is corrupt or exploitative or a bunch of country-club one-percenters. If that was the case, why was the highest authority played by someone as sympathetic as Said Taghmouai? Corrupt organizations in movies are always headed by Kevin Spacey or Christopher Walken.
-Tom
I would also accept Lawful Neutral!
-Tom
Haha Tom knows that baseball has gone runs.
PS @Kelly_Wand “brooch” is pronounced BROACH.
“You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a roach clip looks like a cockroach.”
Thanks, Brose!
I dusted off the account that I apparently made years ago and am possibly making my first post here, outside of the old Disqus comments, because I really need to weigh in.
The plot of the second John Wick movie is (wait, let me look up the names) Santino D’Antonio using John’s marker to compel him to assassinate his sister so that he could usurp her place at the High Table. The movie shows there to be no taboo (besides, you know, the taboo of killing someone) and no punishment meted out to him and his for conspiring to kill a member of the High Table, while the Bowery King is mutilated and left for dead for far less dire of an act (that is, giving John a gun and bullets that were used to get him to where he could kill Santino). There’s definitely a sense in the third movie, not highlighted because the script is utterly inept in places, that the High Table is allowed to play its games and those under the Table should obey and not interfere. That’s why we get Halle Berry saying that literally any wrong step could get her removed as manager and Said Taghmaoui asking John Wick to chop off his ring finger and give up his wedding ring after the latter said that his only reason for living was to remember his wife. It’s a high-handed system, and you either serve at the pleasure of the Table or suffer for it.
Also, to clarify my email, I didn’t like the fight with the bulletproof guys because they had to look incompetent to account for why, in the fight scene version of Tom’s ten-minute movie rule with Open Water, they didn’t take John’s bullets without flinching and then mow him down. The movie, in general, had a hard time not making its antagonists come off as stupid, like poor Mark Dacascos’ enthusiasm reading as foolish and conceited.
I thought he was star-struck and did find their encounters kinda funny, as did most of the audience where I saw it.
Yes. He’s a fanboy, and as fanboys do, he’s being annoying and ignoring personal boundaries. Which is why I don’t feel John’s annoyance at him is dickish as much as relatable.
The problem I have with those final fight scenes is that they’ve recruited people that have much deeper martial arts experience than Keanu, and Marc Dacascos, Cecep Rahman and Yayan Ruhian are clearly holding back, and the fanboy metatext only goes so far to paper over the difference.
Compare it to the fights with Common in John Wick 2 and you can feel the difference.
This is an excellent point. As much as I loved the movie, I thought that whole issue of the “students” holding back was silly, which is another reason I decided this was a comedy. John Wick seems just as surprised as I was when the students help him up. There’s a sort of, “Are we in the bizarro world?” vibe to that.
-xtien
“I’ve never seen a man fight so hard to end up back where he started.”