THE CONTINENTAL-FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK

FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK is exactly what it sounds like. The three-episode miniseries event takes the audi-ence back to the 1970s, when Ian McShane’s Winston Scott (the title character’s mentor in the JOHN WICK movies) was a devilishly handsome con artist who wanted nothing to do with the mysterious syndicate of organized crime that serves as the collective antago-nist of the original film franchise.

Portrayed as a young man by Colin Woodell, Winston is off in Europe swindling busi-nessmen 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 is clearly no more than an amusing side gig for the former leading man). Cormac coerces Winston into helping him track down his estranged older brother, Frankie, who has stolen an invaluable antique coin press from the Continental; a coin press that the Table, the twelve-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 his brother. The brothers are reunited just before the Ta-ble’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. He assembles a crack team of criminals and thugs to infiltrate the Continental and kill everyone inside, wresting control of Cor-mac’s empire. The most noteworthy of these is the beloved JOHN WICK supporting character Charon, Winston’s “man on the inside” at the Continental. WILL WINSTON successfully avenge his brother?

Fans of the JOHN WICK franchise, and Winston Scott’s character in particular, may find this story summary intriguing, if not riveting, which in fact it is, at least conceptually. That’s because this plot summary is written in only three paragraphs, not the four and a half hours of screen time that the miniseries uses. 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 a five-hour doldrum that induces viewers to spend a majority of the runtime on their phones or otherwise occupying their unstimulated minds. Thus, this miniseries spends more time chasing unnecessary subplots than it does developing Winston, Frankie, Cor-mac, and Charon into gripping characters whose fates become personal to us. This is a weakness that the JOHN WICK movies do not share. Consequently, although THE CON-TINENTAL has all of the JOHN WICK franchise’s epic battles and stunning locations, it has none of its narrative tightness and stirring character moments (save one sequence where Winston and his brother, Frankie, repair their brotherly relationship while on the run).

To make matters worse, a number of the aforementioned extraneous subplots seem to ex-ist solely to extend the degree of immoral content in the miniseries, 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 pro-gram’s hefty dose of foul language, as well as moderate sexual content and brief nudity. Finally, the characters behave with self-centered hedonism, vengefulness and violence that renders THE CONINENTAL worthy of abhorrent for all viewers.