The Continental, the limited series from Peacock pulled from the World of John Wick is behind us, and ..

It was kind of an underwhelming mess.

Yeah, doing John Wick without John Wick was always going to be a heavy lift, but there were some serious creative questions here and when the credits rolled on the finale, I wasn’t just missing Keeanu Reeves, I was wondering how they could have made this potentially wonderful spin off a better experience. There were no shortage of ideas.

Here is how The Continental could have been better than what we were given.

They should have made it a stand alone movie: When someone asks me for a recommendation on The Continental, I’m going to tell them to skip straight for the third episode. Because that’s what we wanted to see. We didn’t need three hours of characters we don’t care about. It should have been Winston, Charon, and guns. Lots of guns. We didn’t even make it into the armory here.

Don’t kill the coolest character in the series: Katie McGrath got high marks playing The Adjudicator and I have to agree. In what was less than 10 minutes of screen time, she was a scene stealer. You could argue they could have made a better spin off with her.

More John Wick cool, less Saturday morning cartoons: Some of the action down the stretch leaped off the track a bit. There is a vibe with John Wick but it never gets silly. Strapping a belt of C4 to a person and just having a tiny explosion, cutting the lights in a firefight, or chopping off a hand to stop an explosion is just ridiculous and it’s all been done before.

A more grounded Mel Gibson: Despite his problems, we know Mel Gibson can act. But he was given rubbish. Cormac was a goofball, who was so foolish at times, you wonder how he got The Continental to begin with. A better version would have been something like a sellout version of Porter from Payback which also starred Gibson (more on that HERE).

Maybe spend more time in the continental: Except for the final act of the third episode, we didn’t get much development in the actual hotel. Instead, we hung out in a karate dojo, a trailer park, and the past.

Will The Continental make my ‘worst of 2023’? I don’t know. But what I do know is that this mythology deserved a much better treatment than what we were given.

What a shame. At least Peacock got Twisted Metal right.

What did you think? Let me know in the comments.

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