I was also in favour of the bulletproof suits. The progression in the John Wick series is actually extremely well-done: in JW1 he outclasses his opponents in every metric except numbers; in JW2 he meets several opponents whose hand-to-hand prowess equals his own and he struggles when the plot denies him his guns - but his shooting prowess remains an advantage throughout.<p>In JW3 a higher class of mooks are added to the mix, who are clumsy in their heavy armor but immune to most small arms fire. They require close-up kill shots or less practical weapons like slow-reloading shotguns to dispatch. Wick’s first encounter with these armored soldiers is actually film-making genius: <a href="https://youtu.be/e7VegkzbJOY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/e7VegkzbJOY</a> , it plays out like a usual scene where he guns down the mooks with ease… and right as the viewer feels like the scene is about to end, one of the shot-down soldiers coughs and simply gets back up, startling John, and we see him have to empty entire mags into each opponent to actually kill them.<p>JW4 ups the ante once again, giving most mooks the same kind of bulletproof suit that John has. The result is that in many fights, gunshots are mostly long-range punches that have to be combined with regular punches and other martial arts to overpower the opponent thoroughly enough that a coup-de-grace headshot can be delivered.<p>There is an absolutely valid criticism of the JW series, though, and that is the falls. Particularly the five story fall at the end of JW3, and there’s at least one and maybe two in JW4 that egregiously break suspension of disbelief. It’s a clumsy mis-step in terms of film-making craft, as big falls are the gold standard of final death in movies. It even hurts a pivotal scene in JW4 where a mid-boss dies by falling two stories directly onto his head - when I saw it in theaters, I could unfortunately sense the audience expecting the mid-boss to get back up like John Wick would have. Because of the non-lethal fall in JW3, they didn’t really buy that this boss had actually died.<p>Another valid criticism, specifically for JW4 alone, is that it has one scene which too-shamelessly tries to recapture the magic of the club shootout moment where Wick is backlit by the visualization, 3:40 here in the original <a href="https://youtu.be/0L9SzBANF0w" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/0L9SzBANF0w</a> and 0:50 here in JW4 <a href="https://youtu.be/iEyNlN9AGLE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/iEyNlN9AGLE</a>. It also tries to re-use the club scene music, but I think it succeeds here just on the raw awesomeness of doing a full 3-minute one-take Hotline Miami reference <a href="https://youtu.be/LdWdPykQhSQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/LdWdPykQhSQ</a>.