If there's one thing The Continental: From the World of John Wick does extremely well, it's remind you just how great the John Wick movies are.
This three-part prequel series seeks to deepen the lore and world-building of the John Wick franchise, but it only succeeds in sucking the life out of it. Oh, did you enjoy the films' distinctive color palette? Hope you like scene after scene of washed-out, dimly lit murk. Obsessed with those gun-fu smackdowns? Feast your eyes on a series of lesser imitations. Love leading man Keanu Reeves? Have fun with noted racist, homophobe, and antisemite Mel Gibson.
SEE ALSO: 31 shows we can't wait to see this fallFittingly, Gibson stars as The Continental's Big Bad, a crime boss named Cormac who is also the manager of the New York Continental. (In the Wick-iverse, this chain of hotels serves as neutral ground for the assassins of the world.) Yet even though Gibson gets top billing — why, Peacock, why? — The Continental's true focus is actually a young Winston Scott (Colin Woodell). John Wick fans will recognize Winston as the current-day owner and manager of the New York Continental who is played by Ian McShane in the films. However, when we meet Winston in The Continental, he has yet to achieve that lofty status.
The Continental is a revenge-fueled origin story for John Wick's Winston Scott.
Marina Mazepa, Mark Musashi, and Colin Woodell in "The Continental." Credit: Katalin Vermes/Starz EntertainmentSo, how does Winston rise to the top of New York's criminal underworld? As The Continental tells it, it's a journey rooted in revenge. Cormac took Winston and his brother Frankie (Ben Robson) in as children, sucking them into a cycle of violence and trickery that tore the two brothers apart. Twenty years later, in the 1970s, Frankie steals an all-important coin press from Cormac, and it's up to Winston to help his brother escape Cormac's clutches — and bring his criminal empire crumbling down.
Destroying Cormac is no small feat, so Winston sets out recruiting a team that's both strong and just foolish enough to face the legions of assassins within the Continental's walls. Among his allies are Frankie's lethal wife Yen (Nhung Kate), as well as gun-running, dojo-owning siblings Miles (Hubert Point-Du Jour) and Lou (Jessica Allain). Their hackneyed backstories come to life through stilted expository dialogue and uninspired flashbacks; Frankie and Winston's own traumatic past gets more or less the same lackluster treatment.
The Continental delivers John Wick action that ranges from awesome to underwhelming.
Mark Musashi and Marina Mazepa in "The Continental." Credit: Starz EntertainmentLuckily, things get mildly better once The Continental's characters stop talking and start fighting. Like in the John Wick films, fighters make do with whatever weapons they can get their hands on, be they guns, swords, or something less conventional, like a pool cue. These action sequences are where you'll get the most joy out of The Continental, as Cormac looses the strangest assassins the hotel has to offer on Winston and his small army.
Chiefest among these assassins are twins Hansel and Gretel (Mark Musashi and Marina Mazepa), who are as fun to watch as they are threatening. They never speak, choosing instead to let their austere bangs and long leather coats ripped out of The Matrix do the talking. In the end, their silence is their superpower. It's far more interesting to read the history in their shared glances and movements than to watch another clichéd flashback. Best of all, they're full of surprises, graduating from shooting guns to displaying some of the most impressive hand-to-hand combat skills in the entire series. Between the twins and the hotel's other wonderfully weird hitmen-in-residence, The Continental does prove it has some genuinely killer surprises up its sleeve.
SEE ALSO: Why 'John Wick: Chapter 4's body count mattersIf only you could see them. The Continental's visuals leave quite a bit to be desired, especially when compared to the neon-tinged cool of the John Wick series. Here, scenes are darker, colors are duller, and action suffers as a result.
The action, which draws on everything from gritty police thrillers to martial arts by way of Blaxploitation films, also suffers from strange staging choices. At times, scenes are clumsily cut to bits. At others, The Continental directors Albert Hughes and Charlotte Brandstrom opt for longer takes, a common tool in the John Wick handbook, and in action films in general. However, the show's long takes often highlight the flaws in its fight choreography, or even moments where a move has been sped up too much, completely disrupting a scene's rhythm.
Even when a fight succeeds, such as a long take stairwell brawl between Frankie and Cormac's men, you can't help but feel like you've seen it before. The former recalls a similar stairwell sequence from 2017's Atomic Blonde, directed by The Continental executive producer David Leitch. Elsewhere, an early party scene conjures up several other, better club-set sequences from John Wick. Between these similarities and a relentless slew of distracting '70s needle drops (according to The Continental's press notes, there are 46 in total), it's almost impossible to completely immerse yourself in the show's action.
Thanks to its very nature, The Continental has placed itself in comparison with John Wick, whose stunts and fights hit hard enough to elicit pained groans and gasps from viewers. By comparison, The Continental's combat sequences, as fun as they can be, fail to reach that level of visceral spectacle.
Then, there's the Mel Gibson of it all.
Mel Gibson in "The Continental." Credit: Katalin Vermes/Starz EntertainmentWhile occasionally underwhelming action and clichéd character beats bring The Continental into "meh" territory, the choice to cast Gibson takes us straight into the realm of "total misfire."
Somehow, despite a series of controversies, Gibson continues to have a career as a director and an actor. There's no shortage of grizzled, intense actors in their sixties out there — why did The Continental have to cast him? According to an interview with IGN, Hughes (who is also an executive producer on the series) said Gibson "fit what we needed," a statement that only makes sense if what the show needed was a bad performance.
Gibson's Cormac is a villain devoid of charisma or menace. His devious plans — almost always involving murdering a subordinate — are so painfully telegraphed that nothing he does comes as a surprise. He chews the scenery harder than Cormac chows down on his lavish steak dinners, but there's no flavor or depth to his outbursts or interrogations. To make matters worse, Gibson barely even tries to sell the groan-worthy puns peppered throughout the script. After beating an employee to death with a golf club, Cormac says, "As you can see, I got pretty teed off." Groan. Upon meeting an army of unhoused people, he declares himself "hobophobic." Boo. Maybe another actor could have sold these egregious jokes with some kind of villainous glee, but from a straight-faced Gibson (whose history does not mesh well with these quips), they land dead in the water.
Not even performances from the ensemble cast can distract from the black hole that is Gibson here. Woodell is charming enough, and believable as a younger version of McShane's Winston. The same goes for Ayomide Adegun as a younger Charon, Cormac's right-hand man who will one day become Winston's concierge (played in the John Wick films by the late, great Lance Reddick). Yet these ties to the John Wick franchise are not enough to fully salvage The Continental, even as Winston executes a barn-burning assault on the Continental itself.
Besides, if you really want to watch a scorched-earth revenge story set in "the world of John Wick," John Wick is already right there.
The Continental: From the World of John Wick premieres Sept. 22 on Peacock.
