Picking up the story minutes after Keanu Reeves's unkillable hitman is forced to run with open season declared on his head, this hits the action without anything so attention-demanding as a preamble and then keeps on steaming ahead at full throttle. Keeping track of the bodycount, which some tried to do with the previous instalments, is quite futile by now. Perhaps stats might, by this stage, be better kept on the methods of dispatching the droves of goons who keep on materialising everywhere he goes, as conveniently timed as in any FPS so that there's always no more than two popping up any second to be sent to Hades with a kick in the balls - which actually seems to be more effective than the ultrafetishised arsenal of guns brandished - followed by the obligatory headshot or three for good measure.
If the first two films left any room for doubt, that is now decisively dispelled: this is action as a two-hour porn film, with all the begrudging concessions to story that implies. The increasingly jowly and single-expression Reeves occasionally just has enough time to growl a piece of wit unworthy of a Schwarzenegger actioner after another execution and then it's on to the next swarm of nondescript enemies. It becomes quite staggeringly boring long before the half-hour mark and reviewers praising the hyperstylisation of the violence choreography (which they always call 'balletic', as if that conferred any artistic merit on it) are either corporate shills or have the minds of 13-year-old boys.
3/10
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