Mel Gibson Is Embarrassingly Bad in The Continental

The John Wick movies have built their success on several key elements. There's Keanu Reeves' movie-star performance as the titular out-of-retirement assassin carrying out various acts of vengeance or self-preservation; stylized orgies of violence and mayhem; the confident and baroque world-building, as Wick navigates a cabal of international assassins and their hierarchy. But one under-discussed aspect is how perfectly episodic they are. In each film, Wick is aggressed in a specific way, then spends the rest of the film blazing a path towards bloody resolution.

With strong world-building and standalone storytelling baked into the John Wick formula, you'd think it could be adapted seamlessly for TV. Unfortunately, The Continental — Peacock's three-episode "event series," subtitled From the World of John Wick, because everything has to be a Wizarding World of some kind these days — is stymied by an overstuffed, insufficiently episodic plot. And that's before its A-List headliner who’s riddled with controversy begins devouring the intricately built scenery.

Writer-producers Greg Coolidge, Kirk Ward, and Shawn Simmons have picked the right angle for a John Wick spin-off. The Continental hotels are some of the most intriguing aspects of the movies: gorgeously appointed edifices in the middle of bustling, violent cities that serve as gathering places for the franchise’s interconnected world of elite assassins. The only rule is that no "business" — i.e. killing or violence of any kind — can be carried out on the grounds of any Continental hotel. The New York City location has been managed in the films by Winston, played with well-mannered cunning by the great Ian McShane.The Continental seeks to tell Winston's origin story, which begins in flashback as two young brothers get busted for a horrific crime. The oldest, Frankie, takes the rap, while the youngest, Winston, is shipped off to London. As adults, the brothers are estranged, though both embroiled in the criminal underworld. Winston (Colin Woodell) is running elegant grifts among the posh English elite, while Frankie (Ben Robson) is a brutish thug in the employ of The Continental's current owner, Cormac, played by Mel Gibson. In the first feature-length episode of the series, Frankie betrays Cormac, and without getting into the details, Winston ends up declaring his intent to exact bloody revenge on his brother's behalf.

Ideally, a spin-off about the Continental would have lent itself to a more episodic layout, with standalone stories about the various criminals who have passed through its halls. But as a shorter event series, you can see why Coolige, Ward, and Simmons went for a strong central narrative. And in Winston's story, The Continental has everything it needs: the hotel with its intricate rules for criminal conduct, combined with a revenge plot from which our main character will not be deterred. But the showrunners seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. Instead of delivering a panoply of individual crime stories, The Continental crams half a dozen other stories into Winston's tale.

Thr overstuffed plot constantly gets in its own way. Winston's revenge arc is complicated by the likes of Miles (Hubert Point-Du Jour) and Lou (Jessica Allain), sibling gunrunners with daddy issues and a small criminal organization of their own. Additional subplots center on the Asian criminal outfit in the city and their gang of orphan children, Frankie's Vietnamese wife Yen (Nhung Kate), and the two cops carrying on an extramarital affair who after Winston and his brother. Rather than contribute to a satisfyingly complex array of stories, these characters and their backstories and motivations gum up the works — not given enough time to truly flourish, but taking too much time away from Winston's story.

There is one fairly successful subplot, and it's probably not coincidentally the other one that involves a character from the John Wick. Charon is the concierge of the Continental in New York, played in the films by the late Lance Reddick. Played here by Ayomide Adegun, he's a young pup of an apprentice to Cormac. We know Charon ends up becoming Winston's trusted associate, so the suspense is wondering how he gets there. And while that story is packed with tragedy and at least one moment of true ugliness, there's a satisfaction in watching him and Winston finally align.

Other elements of the show work better in smaller, more enigmatic doses. Ray McKinnon plays an eccentric sharpshooter aligned with Winston. There are a pair of assassins called Hansel and Gretl who are styled like Fred Armisen characters, or maybe if you dipped Anton Chigurh and the Sia dancing girl in black paint. The more The Continental deals in characters like these and in High Table MacGuffins like a coveted coin-press, the more it starts to feel like something that really is from the world of John Wick.

Where the show definitely falls short of John Wick's standard is in its aesthetic design. After an opening that teases the neon lights we've come to expect from these films, plus a pulsating facsimile of Studio 54 that raises audience expectations for gaudy '70s excess, the show settles into the most depressingly muddy color palette you ever saw. Why is everything brown and olive-colored? Why is every scene set at dusk? Where is that signature bisexual lighting we've come to know and love?

And then there is Mel Gibson, who has been truly taken off the leash and handed the most ludicrously overindulgent dialogue. There will be people who enjoy a performance this unhinged, but it absolutely unbalances the rest of the show. By now we should all be used to Gibson having been issued a fast pass through the line for re-admission into Hollywood's good graces, despite never actually atoning for the racist tirades and domestic assault allegations that pepper his history. He's back directing movies and getting Oscar nominations and showing up in mainstream comedies again, so don't ask any questions. Still, it's hard to take Gibson relishing quite so obnoxiously in a character like Cormac. And even if you can separate the art from the artist, it's especially hard to stomach a Mel Gibson character, even one so well established in his overt villainy, mercilessly beating a queer-coded character to death as he does in the middle chapter of this series. This isn't a "Bury Your Gays" problem, it's Mel Gibson problem. And again, it may not be a problem for everyone. But for others, it will leave a rancid taste.

There's still a lot to enjoy about The Continental. Woodell, while no Ian McShane, delivers a charismatic lead performance. The final episode uses the geography of the Continental hotel, with its passages and security features, very well in its various action set pieces. It's the most thrilling use of pneumatic tubes you'll have seen in a minute. References to Blue Velvet and No Country for Old Men are fun Easter eggs, in addition to the more pointed ones regarding to various pieces of John Wick ephemera, from a car to a masked High Table representative. The early glimpses of characters who pop up later in the movies serve as an homage rather than a cheap wink.

With those virtues, The Continental should work better than it does. Ultimately, the show can't fully overcome the burden of too much story, nor can it obscure Gibson's embarrassingly awful performance. There is a version of a John Wick spin-off series that could work for TV, but this one isn't it.

New episodes of The Continental drop on Peacock for the next three Fridays. Join the discussion about the show in our forums.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.