“the inevitable outcome is bureaucracy”

Khoi Vinh on John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum:

In the Wick-verse this tendency towards bureaucracy literally manifests itself as a bureaucracy. So we see in this latest episode even more of what we began to see in “John Wick: Chapter 2”: more jargon, more prototocols, more paperwork, more dialogue devoted to characters shouting the world’s rules back at one another. The end result is tedium, but what’s really happening is that the beautifully succinct motivation that drove the original “John Wick,” that revenge fantasy that was so simple and effective as to be almost poetic, has become now fully diffused. It’s no longer clear what Wick wants, what he’s fighting for, why he exists. Instead he’s become little more than a tour guide, an excuse for us to shuffle from one tediously “weird” department of the bureaucracy to another. Where this universe used to be about a man who could kill with a pencil, it now instead devotes itself to a morass of tiresome pencil pushers.

It used to be, “All good things must come to an end.”

Now it’s, “All good things must turn into bureaucracies.”

via Kottke

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