The Continental Marks A Bizarre First For The John Wick Franchise
For the first spin-off of the "John Wick" series, "The Continental" is quite a drastic departure.
Following in the footsteps of Keanu Reeves' wildly popular bloody revenge film series, this Peacock original series feels different in so many ways. Sometimes the differences are very subtle and hard to immediately identify in an unsettling way – perhaps that's why it's been so divisive among critics. Some changes are tonal ("The Continental" is closer to a crime thriller than it is an action blockbuster); others are structural (world-building and exposition aren't weaved throughout the story consistently). There's one massive change, however, that viewers may not have noticed — one that arguably goes the furthest to separate "The Continental" from the world of "John Wick."
For the first time in the franchise, "The Continental" features real people — which is to say, people fully oblivious to and/or outside the influence of the High Table — with speaking parts. In the "John Wick" series, everyone from the policeman who shows up at John's door in New Jersey to the Parisian disk jockey who taunts him through the radio is connected in some way to the film's central criminal underworld. The first and last time there's any focus on characters outside this world — even transitionally — is the very beginning of the first "John Wick" film. Now, with "The Continental," this conceit has been broken — leading to unexpected issues and revealing the key problem with this promising "John Wick" project.
Normal people have no place in the John Wick world
The characters of "John Wick" are key to establishing this weird world and holding it together in a way that feels freshly engaging for the audience. The undeniable charm of all four films can be traced back to how even its smallest players eke out information about the seductive criminal underworld John is slowly descending back into.
Partly as a function of its protagonist (a young Winston Scott, played by Colin Woodell), "The Continental" completely abandons this comforting, series-specific trope, curiously to establish the world adjacent to the one audiences are actually interested in. For a series subtitled "From the World of John Wick," it seems perplexingly preoccupied with the world outside of the Baba Yaga in the premiere episode. Winston himself spends the first "Night" as an intermediary between the two, introduced in a sequence concerned entirely with normal investors and a normal girlfriend. With every moment he spends in conversation with these characters, "The Continental" insidiously drags itself away from the universe fans were hoping to explore.
This departure from the "John Wick" storytelling tradition might have something to do with the lack of direct involvement from the film series' guiding hands — Chad Stahelski, Derek Kolstad, and Shay Hatten. Though Stahelski and Kolstad are attached as executive producers, all three episodes are written and directed by creatives with no prior experience creating in this world. That's not to say they were inherently incapable of telling a good "John Wick" story, but that all involved underestimated the subtleties of what makes this world so arrestingly unique and mysterious.
It will certainly be interesting to see what departures "Ballerina" makes with Hatten as scribe, but it may want to heed some lessons from the apparent missteps of "The Continental."