Gotham Calling

Let’s finish this month’s reminders that comics can be awesome by going back to the ‘90s, when covers raised absurd macho bullshit to hilarious extremes, displaying the kind of shamelessly dumb and eagerly badass attitude still echoed in recent films like Sisu and John Wick: Chapter 4.

If the former is basically John Wick in WWII Finland, the latter actually turned out to be a sad case of diminishing returns: the first John Wick worked as a minimalistic revenge thriller with a somewhat quirky take on a familar genre, the second film pushed the visuals to an almost art-house level while entertainingly escalating the stakes to unexpected degrees, and the third one provided a relentless barrage of effective and inventive action set pieces, but this final chapter feels like just more of the same without any of the original freshness. Still, at its best (the Osaka Continental free-for-all, the instant classic fight at the Rue Foyatier staircase, Wick weaponizing traffic around the Arc de Triomphe), Chapter 4 has the flavor of those trashy comics from an era when everyone seemed to think ‘blood’ was the coolest thing you could name a series…