If the John Wick franchise were a videogame then this would very much feel like a DLC add-on pack for John Wick Chapter 3, but I don't think that's a bad thing at all because I'm just grateful we get to see different aspects of the world around John Wick because by now it's clear that the worldbuilding around the Continental and the people who inhabit are as much a staple of why the films are so successful as the action itself.
Initially there is an immediate feeling from the first action sequence of "oh.. well this certainly isn't the winning combination of Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves that I've grown accustomed to" and it never quite manages to reach that height at any point, but I feel like that's almost in the film's favour when you get past it.
What I really liked was seeing a side we never got to with John Wick, he's already established from the get go to us in the first film as the "Baba Yaga", this unstoppable force of nature, but with Eve we get to see her grow and develop in her skills throughout the course of the film which keeps an otherwise cliché and generic story structure actually pretty fresh in this setting. It's pretty cool to see the action get gradually more wick-esque as it goes on as a result with the gunplay and various improvised weapons which only get more creative (plus the flamethrower fight in particular was just plain awesome!) If you do really want to be cynical about it you could argue this is entirely down to the clear reshoots by Stahelski himself which are definitely felt once you know, but I'd like to think it's intentional as a natural progression of her story because that's the more fun way to look at it.
I don't necessarily want them to franchise this one, I think if anything I'd rather just see different characters and their different factions occupying the rich world, which I know we sort of are already getting with John Wick Chapter 4's Caine played by Donnie Yen. But if they are going to insist on doing it then Ana De Armas proves her own as a good choice to carry the torch because if her brief but standout screentime in No Time To Die wasn't enough to prove it, when Keanu Reeves makes his inevitable appearance (which I was of course excited about, I'm only human) I didn't feel even he was something that ever overshadowed how good she is as an action star in her own right and that says quite a lot already.
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