We don’t watch the John Wick films for believability. We watch them for spectacle, audacity, and Keanu Reeves’s extraordinary way of uttering “Yeah,†for a fantasy world in which our titular assassin has somehow survived four movies of gunfights and falling out of buildings and getting hit by cars. Within this milieu, no regular people in New York City, Rome, Tokyo, or Paris are really affected by John and the murderous maniacs chasing him; there’s a self-containment to their byzantine codes of honor, revenge, and loyalty that helps suspend our disbelief, and it’s integral to John Wick’s accepted absurdity.
The overextended spinoff series The Continental: From the World of John Wick is built on a miscalculation that both misses that outlandish appeal and overestimates the inherent interest in a battle over real estate. The puppy in John Wick was never just a puppy, but The Continental loses its way in trying to be about more than just a building. The series, debuting on Peacock September 22, erodes itself by committing to actual historical events, to questions of sexism and racism, and to thin commentary on the gap between NYC’s wealthy and poor, all of which are rigidly mundane compared with the franchise’s established eccentricity. It’s too much explanation and exposition where there should be atmosphere, too much grasping for relevance and substance where just vibes would suffice. There’s only one scene in a neon-lit nightclub and only one guy with a katana! The Continental feels afraid to go all-out, limiting itself to a few thrilling action sequences whose creativity makes the sparse character motivations and drawn-out plot that much more belabored.
In the John Wick films, Continental hotels are safe havens for assassins, and the nexus point for various elements of the franchise’s increasingly dense world-building: Guests can only pay in special gold coins, the locations are overseen by the mysterious High Table of crime lords, and no killing can occur on the grounds. The NYC location was run for decades by manager Winston Scott (Ian McShane) and concierge Charon (Lance Reddick), who across the John Wick chapters often aid Reeves’s character, and The Continental traces how the pair came to lead this place. That means the series (whether it’s limited to one season is unclear; Peacock has advertised it as a “three-part eventâ€) mostly occurs in a fuzzy time between the late 1970s and early 1980s, in a version of NYC that looks like The Warriors, Sin City, and Joker run through a grimy-CGI filter. Graffiti and trash are everywhere, large numbers of unhoused people populate the sidewalks, owners walk away after their dogs defecate in the street, and racially organized gangs terrorize each other. The city is home to doomed idealists trying to carve out an existence (basically all the women in this show), Vietnam War veterans who turn to crime because they can’t reacclimate (basically all the men in this show), and the misfits and weirdos who live in the Continental, overseen by “crooked cocksucker†Cormac O’Connor (Mel Gibson, as distracting and unnecessary as that fat suit Scott Adkins wore in John Wick: Chapter 4).
Cormac is a bad guy defined by very little outside of his bombast, ’70s-era offensiveness toward anyone who isn’t a white man, and tendency to beat people to death, and The Continental unites the enemies intent on taking the hotel from him. Primary among them are the Scott brothers, Winston (Colin Woodell) and Frankie (Ben Robson), who were separated in childhood after a criminal event; the former was sent to London, where he became a bit of a con-man entrepreneur, while the latter served in Vietnam and then became an enforcer for the Continental when he returned home. There’s nothing physically similar about Woodell and Robson, but there’s a prickly quality to their interactions that suggests a once-close relationship turned sour. What The Continental does best, actually, is believable enmity between people who otherwise care about each other: between Frankie and his Vietnamese wife and ally Yen (Nhung Kate); gun runner Miles (Hubert Point-Du Jour) and his sister Lou (Jessica Allain); Continental concierge Charon (Ayomide Adegun) and his only friend at the hotel, cellist Thomas (Samuel Blenkin); and NYC detective KD (Mishel Prada) and her superior and lover, Mayhew (Jeremy Bobb).
These characters are sparsely conceived, and their reasons for going up against Cormac broad. Only a few of them feel like they genuinely fit into the John Wick world — like the wonderful Ray McKinnon sliding into a dandy accent to play aging assassin and devoted horticulturist Jenkins — and neither Woodell nor Adegun fully evokes the older versions of their characters as played by McShane and Reddick. But the underlying structural problem is that The Continental’s center of narrative gravity never really solidifies amid so much would-be pithy dialogue (including an overreliance on characters mocking Winston for his ascot), so many forcibly engineered franchise Easter eggs, and so many side plots. Although Winston and Charon are the most familiar figures, the series doesn’t sit with them equally. Instead, it trips over itself to bring in more characters, grudges, High Table shenanigans, and contemporaneous political issues that feel worthy of more nuance than The Continental can give them, in particular, the suggestion embodied by Frankie and Miles that imperialism-approved warfare translates easily into privatized, for-profit violence. And because the series is so enamored with the kind of accessorizing that the John Wick franchise usually avoids, that thoughtful stuff can’t cut through the noise of needle drops from ZZ Top, Yes, James Brown, Black Sabbath, Heart, and more accompanying nearly every scene transition, sex scenes and body horror, and a weird reliance on gay-panic moments.
When The Continental displays the purity of focus that makes the John Wick films work so well, though, it hits on all lizard-brain synapses. The action scenes don’t always follow the Chad Stahelski format; the takes aren’t as long, the editing is choppier, and there are fewer close-up frames. But these punching-kicking-shooting-blowing-stuff-up duels are when The Continental and its characters feel most alive, their stakes the most dire. The series wants to draw a line between the grit and turbulence of NYC at this time and the trauma and anger its characters carry with them, and that breeding ground for malcontent feels most resonant when Frankie spits out a drink offered by Cormac and then fights his way through a stairway full of attackers, the camera tight on his twisting and turning body; when two people beat the crap out of each other while trapped in a telephone booth, or another hangs out of a car window firing a machine gun. The Continental is at its most immersive during the rigor and rhythm of combat and most overworked when the bloodshed stops. Despite being part of a franchise that’s comfortable flying close to the narrative sun, it remains frustratingly grounded.