So, after a hefty amount of build up, a metric ton of world building and more throwback, banging needle drops than a dozen Tarantino pictures, The Continiental comes to the end of its epic trio of feature length episodes that looked to prequelize the bombastic world of John Wick.
If I’m being honest, while I’ve enjoyed the first two nights of my stay at the titular hotel, it has been something of a slow burner as the show runners took their sweet time moving a rather sizable amount of pieces around the board of a filth-soaked, 1970s New York; however, patience, as they say, is apparently a virtue and I was kind of relying on this third night to finally pull the trigger on the sort of shrapnel-studded action we’ve come to know and love from the world of John Wick.
Thankfully, The Continental has belatedly catered to my frenzied whims.
Things ain’t looking particularly promising for Winston Scott’s plans to stage a coup of the mysterious, yet palatial, hitman hotel that sits in the middle of Manhattan that calls itself the Continental. Not only is the building something of a law unto itself thanks to shadowy cadre of kingpins known as the High Table, but it’s run by the ferociously paranoid crime boss, Cormac O’Conner who manipulated both Winston and his recently deceased brother, Frankie, into the world of crime when they were both very young.
Winston, wanting both revenge and the Continental, had amassed a gang of sharp shooters and killers in order to pull of this coup, but the lynchpin of his entire plan proved to be turning O’Conner’s devoted concierge, Charon, against his master in order to secure an inside man who will prove to be vital to success.
However, it seemed that Charon was apparently not convinced and clued his maniacal boss in to the shit that’s due to roll up to his doorstep in a matter of hours – something that pushes the already under-pressure tyrant over the drug-sniffing edge. Deciding that all the palaver caused by Frankie stealing a coin press vital to the High Table’s operations should now be shelved in order to protect his own interests, O’Conner finally makes a move against Winston and has his men bring him to the hotel before he can enact his assault, but unbeknownst to him, Charon’s loyalty isn’t actually as dependable as he’d hoped and thus a complicated sting operation finally snaps into place.
However, the con doesn’t quite go to plan and Winston’s group find themselves having to desperately make things up as they go as the building’s entire population of murders and lunatics is set loose on mission to purge every single infiltrator on sight.
Now this is what I was waiting for.
There’s a lot about The Continental I was really enjoying as its colourful (if thinly sketched) cast of characters wandered around a grotesquely decadent and thoroughly rotten Big Apple, looking for excuses to band together and settle some scores that linked them all in some way or another. However, while the backdrop was similarly grimy and groovy (over half the extensive soundtrack has already found a home on my Spotify account), it was more than a little frustrating that after around two hours and forty minutes of build up, I didn’t really feel that much of a kinship with any of the main players. Now while the exaggerated, stylized kind of characterization you normally find lurking within the world of John Wick is somewhat eccentric by design, there’s also frequent bursts of violent, perfectly choreographed motion to stop us from over-examining the brutal cartoonishness of, say, Scott Adkins’ obese Killa or Mark Dacascos’ fanboying Zero. However, so far the action in The Continental, aside from an opening gun fight and the odd bout of Kung-Fu goodness, has been somewhat minimal which has exposed a flaw here and there with the occasional spot of motivation. Colin Woodell’s Winston remained too much of a conventional hero instead of invoking the baroque deliciousness of Ian McShane’s iteration while other characters like Mishel Prada’s snooping detective, KD Silva, seemingly had nothing to do except complain in a New York drawl. Hell, even Mel Gibson’s monstrous crime boss seemed dialed down when you consider how famously unhinged the former action star can play, but finally, in the final episode, everyone gets to play.
As the sometimes laborious build up finally reaches its apex, the story mercifully starts raining payoff almost as much as it rains spent bullet casings upon the hotel’s ornate carpets as ditector Albert Hughes slams the show into that fifth gear we’ve all been waiting for and gives us the cordite scented chaos I’ve been hankering for.
Everything you was hoping to get from a John Wick prequel comes to pass in some form or another with the franchise’s most intriguing double act of Winston and Charon finally the bromance origin story you hoped they would as they stumble through the blizzard of gunfire, watching each other’s backs as they’re probably the two least natural born killers in the entire building by quite a distance. In comparison, their oddly wholesome friendship is nicely counterbalanced by Gibson finally being allowed to go full batshit and while I understand that the actor’s turbulent history may be anathema to certain viewers, watching him chew the scenery with a fighting lack of restraint, be it roaring deranged, religious rhetoric after getting high from an ether soaked rag or having mute meltdown via silent CCTV, he proves to be the villain the show’s been demanding all along. Everyone else in the cast is similarly given a new lease of life thanks to the copious action. Frankie’s Vietnamese widow gets to beat her pound of flesh out of the preternaturally flexible hitwoman, Gretal, while siblings Lou and Miles get to work out their dead daddy issues by going head to head with the other half of the brother/sister murder-team, Hansel. Last, but not least, and perhaps most importantly, we actually find out what KC actually has to do with anything and despite the revelation kind of coming out of nowhere, it still completes the string of relevance almost every character is bestowed thanks to the baptism of expansive violence.
And the violence itself? While understandably missing some of the elegance of the films (there’s nothing here that even scrapes the epic, mythic, poetry of the later two John Wick escapades when it comes to skull pulping, yet beautiful, savagery), it still is expansive and manical enough to take aim and obliterate its target with either a high-powered fullisade or a well placed hatchet.
It’s just a shame that The Continental as a whole took a little too long to fully open its doors.
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