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When the repugnant Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård) pulls Caine out of retirement, he uses the weight of the High Table’s authority to force the blind man’s hand. If he does not hunt down and kill John for their secret society, his daughter’s life will be forfeit. He offers a life for a life: John’s death in exchange for Mia’s. Either way, there will be at least one beloved corpse waiting at the end of Caine’s assignment. That is the world these men live by, and the rules that seal their fates. Caine, like John across four films, struggles with accepting it. But he falls into line.
Unlike Koji, who also has a daughter, Caine feels obligated to submit to the High Table. But then Koji’s daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama) is an adult who is capable of understanding the rules of the game on her own, and the more abstract ones pertaining to honor. She protects herself and can close her own debts, including possibly against Caine after he slays her father while on the warpath for Wick. By contrast, Caine’s daughter lacks the tools or even a seeming awareness of the ledger her father can never close.
John is aware though. It’s born from the same arbitrary and Sisyphean rulebook that made him excommunicado after he avenged the death of his dog. And as John memorably said in the original movie, it wasn’t only the heinous slaughter of a puppy he sought retribution for: “When Helen died, I lost everything. Until that dog arrived on my doorstep, a gift from my wife. In that moment, I received some semblance of hope.”
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It is because this criminal culture took that dog from John, stole his hope, that he reentered an underworld that will never let him go again. John Wick: Chapter 4 even begins with the story audiences likely expected: John hunting down the nameless men who sit at the High Table, executing them in bloody vengeance. But as we’re told time and again, you kill one head of the hydra, and another takes its place. John isn’t restoring his hope or anybody else’s by indulging his bloodlust. He’s simply taking life and playing by their rules.
That changes at the end of Chapter 4. Before his final sunrise, Wick sits in a church with Caine. The two have agreed to partake in a duel of pistols like a scene out of Hamilton. Wick fights to free himself; Caine fights in the stead of his employer and enemy, the Marquis. If Caine does not act as the triggerman for the Frenchman, the Marquis will have his daughter executed, robbing Caine of hope by taking another innocent life. Wick acknowledges this, even as he scoffs at the assertion by Caine that the next time they meet will be in the afterlife (something even more bleak since Caine insists he doesn’t believe such a thing).
Yet when the sun finally rises above Paris’ Montmartre district—and after a spectacular series of action sequences where John shoots, stabs, and limps his way to the church on time—Wick is left with a choice. He can murder his friend and take another life…. or give hope to the foe standing before him. Unlike Alexander Hamilton, John doesn’t throw away his shot. He does, however, withhold it. When he and Caine get within 10 paces of each other, he allows Caine to fire first, taking a mortal wound.
