The Continental review: John Wick spinoff series attempts to un-cancel Mel Gibson, and that’s not even the worst thing about it

Starring Colin Woodell, the show serves as an origin story for the character Winston Scott, played in each of the four John Wick movies by the imposing Ian McShane. Winston, as fans of those films would already know, was introduced as the proprietor of the mysterious Continental hotel’s New York City branch — a fancy haven for international assassins that doesn’t permit them to ‘conduct business’ on hotel grounds — but later takes on a more central role in the saga.

As it turns out, the show reveals, Winston had quite the adventurous life even before the son of a Russian mobster decided to murder John Wick’s puppy, sending him on an epic revenge quest across the world. Winston grew up in the Bronx with his elder brother Frankie. They became estranged as adults, and while Frankie enlisted to join the war in Vietnam, Winston made a fortune for himself in England.

The first episode opens with Frankie, having returned from the battlefield, staging a heist on Continental grounds. He steals a valuable artefact from its vault, guns down a bunch of goons, and escapes into the night. The proprietor of the hotel is a man named Cormac, who is played in a rather unpleasant turn of events by Mel Gibson, for whom this could function as the un-cancellation that nobody was asking for. Cormac is livid about the robbery, and under pressure from a couple of menacing emissaries of the High Table — the secret organisation that governs this assassin ecosystem — he puts out a hit on Frankie. Forced out of his complacency, Winston decides to locate and rescue his brother before Cormac’s army can get to him. Along the way, he also decides to take over the Continental for himself — a creative move that renders the show’s central conflict completely inert, considering that we already know he will win.

It also doesn’t help that Winston is already a powerful man when we meet him. In fact, the show goes to great lengths to ensure that he doesn’t use his wealth to save his skin — traditional currency, as fans of the franchise would know, is virtually worthless in the world of John Wick. In one scene, he marches over to the Bowery to meet its present ‘queen’, asks for her assistance in his mission, and tells her to name her price. She scoffs at his naivety. But this begs the question: why not make him more of an underdog to begin with?

After a point, the show stops being about vengeance (or even justice, as Winston keeps saying), and becomes a purely selfish (and moderately commercial, considering the business prospects) mission; a hostile business takeover, a coup, a storming of the castle. On the flip-side, we don’t really get a taste of how powerful Cormac is either. Sure, he murders a child in cold blood once, but that just establishes his cruelty, not his power. If anything, he seems to be under the High Table’s thumb as well.

A more realistic answer to this problem is that Gibson refused to shoot for more than a week, which perhaps also explains why all of his scenes are indoors (although it doesn’t explain why he gets top billing in the opening credits). But The Continental always seems like its stretching every penny. Clearly shot on backlots and soundstages, the show is unable to capture the gritty period authenticity that it is aiming for. Often, it looks like directors Albert Hughes and Charlotte Brändström literally cannot afford to shoot wide — even exterior establishing shots are curiously boxed in, and characters rarely seem to travel; we enter scenes as they arrive at a particular location and exit them as they’re leaving.

Forget replicating the fluid gun-fu choreography of the John Wick movies, two-thirds of the series barely has any action at all. Nor does The Continental even feel like it belongs in the same cine-literate world that Chad Stahelski, David Leitch and Derek Kolstad created all those years ago. The gunfights are unmemorable and the world-building negligible, which is sort of the most damning thing that could be said about a show set in The World of John Wick. It’s like making a zombie series in which nobody gets bitten.

The Continental: From the World of John Wick
Directors – Albert Hughes, Charlotte Brändström
Cast – Colin Woodell, Mel Gibson, Jessica Allain, Ayomide Adegun
Rating – 2/5