Codes of honour in John Wick 3: Parabellum
Why do I like John Wick 3? To begin with, and one eventually does, the title pays attention to the word. The word, understood not merely in its stupidity, as some petrified object cast in stone, which has nothing to do with stone, but is a metaphor for how it is understood. Parabellum, I learn is from the second half of a Latin phrase ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’ which translates to ‘if you want peace prepare for war’. I suppose one may hypothesise that there is something which happens when a word becomes a name, even if, as in this case - the name for a bullet. It looses some of the context from which it rises from and becomes a placeholder, a tag for something else whose relation to the utterance in question remains, for the most of it, completely arbitrary. John Wick 3 is a film that, while very much a gun-fu movie, does not facilitate such a procedure, or rather does not facilitate it as such.
