‘The Continental’: Mel Gibson’s ‘John Wick’ Spinoff Can’t Compete With Keanu’s Original
Why do people love the John Wick movies? Is it because of the charisma and soulfulness of star Keanu Reeves? Is it because of the jaw-dropping action sequences? Or is it because we’re all just fascinated by the gold coins, the High Table, and all the other rules and lore of the assassin world in which John and his friends and enemies operate?
The prequel miniseries The Continental: From the World of John Wick is sure hoping it’s the latter. It has some witty and creative fight scenes, but it lacks Keanu, or anyone else with that amount of magnetism. And my goodness, does it care about the High Table.
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The Continental has been in the works since 2017, originally earmarked to air on Starz before landing on Peacock. This final version was developed by Greg Coolidge, Kirk Ward, and Shawn Simmons and takes the story back to the Seventies, before Winston Scott (played in the films by Ian McShane, here by Colin Woodell) was running the titular hotel. As the story begins, he is in fact living an ocean away, conducting real estate deals in swinging London, and only returns to New York because his brother Frankie (Ben Robson) has stolen the machine used to mint those all-important gold coins. The Continental’s current manager, Cormac (Mel Gibson), is none too happy about this, and willing to kill anyone who stands in between him and the coin press. Winston’s quest to save himself and Frankie eventually involves Frankie’s Vietnamese wife Yen (Nhung Kate), martial arts master siblings Miles (Hubert Point-Du Jour) and Lou (Jessica Allain), aging sniper Gene (Ray McKinnon), cop KD (Mishel Prada), scrounger Charlie (Peter Greene) and Cormac’s protege Charon (Ayomide Adegun), among many others.
Some of these characters, like Charon and Charlie, appear in older form in the movies. Others are wholly new. The movies have large ensembles, but most of the people in them exist to support John’s story, where The Continental creative team tries to turn almost everyone into a protagonist with their own complicated motivations and backstories. It’s a quantity-over-quality approach, trying to compensate for the lack of a big star(*) by hurling one person after another at you, hoping that you’ll at least latch onto one or two of them. If you’re not charmed by the younger Winston telling people that he wears a cravat rather than an ascot, perhaps you’ll invest in Lou trying to prevent Chinese gangsters from taking over her family’s dojo, or in Charon’s friendship with the hotel’s resident cellist, or KD having an affair with married fellow cop Mayhew (Jeremy Bobb), or… you get the idea.
(*) Yes, Mel Gibson was once one of the biggest stars in the world. But that was a long time ago, before he exposed himself as a virulent hater of women, Black people, and Jews. And where once he was a tremendous physical presence whose facility with on-screen action would have made him a perfect fit for this franchise, he’s now in his late 60s and not as fluid of motion. Mostly, he’s here to speak in a cartoonish Noo Yawk accent and bug his eyes out a lot as Cormac grows more and more furious about each failure of his men to stop Winston’s plans. Given that the last hit movie where he was the primary onscreen draw was Signs, which came out 21 years ago, there are any number of actors who could do what Gibson does here without the baggage. Albert Brooks has effectively played criminals and sociopaths in his later career, and he can make bug eyes with the best of them, you know?
But the sheer numbers can’t obscure how flat most of these characters and performances are, and what a slog The Continental can be whenever fists, feet, and bullets aren’t flying. And in the process, these three episodes serve as a reminder that all the “gun fu” of the films would ring hollow if we weren’t already invested in Reeves and John Wick.
The show opens, for instance, with Frankie’s heist of the coin press, followed by a lengthy battle with half the assassins staying at the hotel. While not in the ballpark of what the movies have to offer, it’s still an effectively staged, shot, and edited blast of extended violence. But Frankie is a non-character at this point (and barely more than that later), so it’s all sizzle and no steak. The first John Wick understood that we needed to know and care about John at least a little before we got to watch him turn back into the deadliest man alive; The Continental assumes that starting with an elaborate shootout on a staircase with someone we don’t have feelings about is the best approach. The remainder of the first two episodes attempt to rectify this, but with less than ideal results. Nobody really pops off the screen in terms of personality, though Nhung Kate and Jessica Allain both move very well in the fight scenes. But because the creative team is trying and mostly failing to get us to invest in this earlier generation, it means that we’re not getting a lot of action. The three episodes all clock in around 90 minutes (longer if you don’t have Peacock’s ad-free plan), and you will feel a lot of that length.
The third and final episode, at least, aims for wall-to-wall combat, as Winston’s forces attempt an extremely hostile, in-person takeover of the hotel. Coolidge, Ward, and Simmons previously worked together on the streaming comedy Wayne, whose action set pieces had an anarchic, borderline cartoon feel to them. That approach largely carries over to The Continental. The focus is less on the fluidity of movement that typifies John Wick’s fights, and more on the strange environments and staging choices, like Lou and Mayhew trading blows inside a cramped phone booth, or Miles’ friend Lemmy (Adam Shapiro) trying to fend off a Continental secretary who keeps attacking him with a paper cutter’s blade and other Seventies office supplies. Some of this is fun, and the sheer tonnage of such sequences makes the third episode much livelier than its predecessors. But none is a patch on the films, and there’s almost never a sense that Winston’s side of things is really in danger. The finale demonstrates many unusual methods of killing people, but in a way that somehow lacks tension — and not just because we know Winston and Charon will be in charge here decades later.
There’s also just… so… much… talk about the mythology of assassin world. The first movie offered vague hints about how all of this worked, teasing things in a way that made viewers eager to find out more. This turned into a “be careful what you wish for” situation, as the more granular the sequels got about the gold coins, the pneumatic tubes, and Winston having to kneel before representatives of the High Table, the less interesting any of that material got. At one point, the High Table’s fixer, the Adjudicator (Katie McGrath), insists that the coin press has the ability to “topple an organization that predates the Roman Empire.” I am pretty sure my body instigated an immediate nap after that line, and again after a scene where Winston delivers an inspiring monologue about class warfare to members of the unhoused assassins who will later be led by Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King.
But that material at least stems from flaws of the later films, rather than something The Continental came up with on its own. Similarly, the self-consciously macabre nature of some of the killers — the Adjudicator wears a plastic mask with a lipstick print over the disfigured lower half of her face, while Mark Musashi and Marina Mazepa play creepy, possibly incestuous, almost certainly superhuman assassin twins — doesn’t feel that far removed from some of the movies’ secondary bosses. But on the whole, the show comes across as too pleased with itself, and/or too eager to please. The soundtrack, for instance, is littered with classic Seventies tunes, where the movies don’t generally need to bother with familiar needle drops.
Shows based on popular IP are all the rage among TV development executives, who believe that familiar brand names are the only way to get noticed in a marketplace with way too many shows, and way too many outlets on which to see them. But you have to understand why the audience cared about that IP in the first place, and provide something that will tap into that love. The Continental seems to exist on the assumption that John Wick fans will gobble up anything even tangentially related to the adventures of a man who just loved his dog.
The first episode of The Continental begins streaming on Peacock on September 22, with the remaining episodes releasing on the next two Fridays. I’ve seen all three.
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