THE CONTINENTAL: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: Episode 1.1: “Brothers in Arms”

Episode One of THE CONTINENTAL: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK, streaming on NBC’s Peacock outlet, is exactly what it sounds like. The three-episode miniseries event takes the audience back to the 1970s, when Ian McShane’s Winston Scott (the titular character’s mentor in the JOHN WICK movies) is a devilishly handsome con artist who wants nothing to do with the mysterious syndicate of organized crime that serves as the collective antagonist in the original film franchise.

Portrayed as a young man by Colin Woodell, Winston is off in Europe swindling businessmen and living the high life. Until he’s summoned to the Continental Hotel in New York City by the manager, Cormac O’Connor (Mel Gibson, in a supremely phoned-in performance that’s clearly no more than an amusing side quest for the former leading man).

Cormac coerces Winston into helping him track down Winston’s estranged older brother, Frankie, who’s stolen an invaluable antique coin press from the Continental. The coin press is something that the Table, the 12-person high council of the criminal organization, will stop at nothing to recover (fans of the John Wick universe will recall the importance

of certain distinctive gold coins to the original stories). Knowing that finding Frankie is the only way to stop the Table from killing his brother, Winston reluctantly seeks out Frankie.

The brothers are reunited just before the Table’s henchmen arrive. Though they successfully fight their way to a helicopter and begin to make their escape, a sniper’s bullet takes down Frankie. Winston swears revenge for his brother’s murder, leaving the premiere of The Continental on a cliffhanger.

Fans of the JOHN WICK franchise, and Winston’s character in particular, likely will find such a story intriguing, if not downright riveting, at least conceptually, on paper. However, what sounds intriguing on paper is not so fascinating when stretched out to 90 minutes of screentime, something which could have been accomplished in a fast-paced first act of a standalone feature movie.

Thus, Episode One of THE CONTINENTAL is perfectly symptomatic of all the worst that streaming, as a construct, has to offer. The streaming model enables studios to get away with bloating a fun, compelling two-hour story into what will doubtless end up a five-hour doldrum that induces viewers to spend a majority of the runtime on their phones or otherwise occupying their unstimulated minds. This episode spends more time chasing unnecessary subplots than it does developing Winston, Frankie, Cormac, and Cormac’s assistant (a certain familiar face, so to speak) into gripping characters whose fates become personal to viewers, a weakness that the JOHN WICK movies don’t share. THE CONTINENTAL has all of JOHN WICK’s epic battles and stunning locations, but there’s none of its narrative tightness and stirring character moments (save one moment where Winston and Frankie repair their brotherly relationship while on the run).

To make matters worse, a number of the aforementioned extraneous subplots seem to exist solely to extend the degree of immoral content, including one that primarily revolves around an extramarital affair between two police detectives. This adds to the comes-with-the-territory extreme violence of the action thriller genre and the hefty dose of foul language, as well as moderate sexual content and brief nudity. Despite some positive Christian content, the characters behave with self-centered hedonism, vengefulness and violence, rendering the first episode of THE CONTINENTAL unacceptable.