This Beloved Keanu Reeves Sequel Crushing It On Netflix Right Now

You know how it goes: You meet somebody, they rub you the wrong way, you steal their car, you destroy their beagle. It's pretty boilerplate stuff — the sort of thing that you do every day without even thinking about it, like brushing your teeth or driving to work in a car you just stole. What made "John Wick" such a gripping story was the way that it flipped the script on these actions, asking "what if doggy murder came with consequences?" Here, your standard, work-a-day son of mobster royalty finds himself in a sticky situation after stomping the puppy of the titular John Wick. Wick goes on a tear, screaming through the underbelly of New York City with the dead-eyed tenacity of a blood-starved shark with a whole bunch of guns. Vengeance is wrought. The dog is avenged. A new dog is acquired. All is right in the world.

But then comes "John Wick: Chapter 2," which turns the premise of the first film on its head. "Maybe," the film posits, "some people get upset when their relatives get stomped, the same way that John Wick got upset about his stomped-up dog." More murdering takes place. Common gets a knife stuck in his torso. John finds himself up against the murdering-people community at large, with an "excommunicado" order plastered to his chest. It's the second worst kind of 'icado you can get, right after overripe avocado. John and his new, unstomped dog go on the run, with danger around every corner.

This is the world that viewers can expect to walk into if they flip on "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum," the threequel that's making waves on Netflix right this minute. It's a world of action. A world of adventure. A world where the exchange rate on giant gold coins remains bamboozlingly inconsistent. Like, you can use one to buy a gun or a gin and tonic? Whatever, that's not the point.

So John Wick has a $14 million bounty on his head, which equates to either one gold coin or a bunch of them. With an hour to leave the city and a promise that he'll stomp any assassins that try to stomp him, our hero makes a hasty escape from the city, taking a break to fight some guys in an antique warehouse to keep things interesting.

A jetsetting adventure is well underway, and Wick takes off for Casablanca, searching for a higher-up from the High Table — basically, he wants to speak to a manager. Meanwhile, in New York, change is the only constant, and Wick's old buddies The Bowery King (Lawrence Fishburne) and Winston (Ian McShane) are being forced out of their positions of power on account of their having helped the protagonist. There's plenty of blood, lots of fights, a horse-versus-motorcycle battle in heavy traffic, and so on. Most importantly, thanks to the addition of Halle Berry's Sofia Al-Azwar, the dogs finally get a chance to do some stomping of their own. Basically, if you're looking for a good time at the movies and don't mind watching your hero slaughtering roughly a hundred goons, "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum" might just be your jam.

It is a rare and beautiful thing to find a movie about a guy who's great at shooting people that gets near-uniformly glowing reviews. "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum" is that beautiful thing.

With a Certified Fresh critics' rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes, the third movie in the saga of John Wick is neck-and-neck with "Chapter 2" for the title of Best Reviewed Film in the Franchise. The Chicago Tribune called it "the best of the three so far." The Guardian extolled "fight sequences so balletic you might forget you're watching violence – until Reeves sinks a knife into a man's eye." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, in a 4.5 out of 5 star review, told hesitant potential viewers "you can wait around and hope for a bigger, badder burst of action fireworks than 'John Wick 3,' but you'd be kidding yourself."

All in all, "John Wick: Chapter 3" is everything that fans could hope for in a blockbuster action sequel. It offers the same flavor of violence being doled out in the first two films, with a considered bump in intensity and ambition from series director Chad Stakelski. The worst thing you can say about the picture is that it ends with more of a question mark than a period, but like everything else about the movie, that's a choreographed move — "John Wick: Chapter 4" is slated to hit theaters in 2022.