Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Continental: From the World of John Wick’ On Peacock, A Prequel To The Film Franchise Starring Mel Gibson

There was a fair amount of controversy when it was announced that Mel Gibson would be cast in The Continental, a John Wick prequel series concentrating on Winston Scott and the crime hotel that he will come to manage in the films. What kind of impact will Gibson have on the series? It turns out that the impact is less than one might think, which brings up a whole bunch of other questions.

THE CONTINENTAL: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A Molotov cocktail flies through the air. “New York City, 1955.” Two boys are being questioned by the police. The older one tells the younger one that he’ll take all the blame for the incident.

The Gist: Two decades (give or take) later, one of those two brothers, Frankie Scott (Ben Robson) enters the Continental Hotel in New York, and as he walks through a New Year’s Eve party attended by the city’s crime bigwigs, he takes a second to say hello to Cormac O’Connor (Mel Gibson), the hotel’s manager, and the person who trained him to be a top assassin. Frankie then goes into a subway station, meets an associate, climbs from below back into the hotel, where he is there when the vault is busted open via a rig he set up.

He steals a small vessel and looks inside. When one of Cormac’s thugs catches up with him, Frankie uses those skills to kill a lot of gun-toting henchmen and escape in a cab driven by his wife Yen (Nhung Kate).

In London, Frankie’s younger brother Winston Scott (Colin Woodell) is trying to scam some parking garage development money from a wealthy real estate mogul, while at the same time bedding the man’s wife. He’s grabbed by a couple of men and he next finds himself in New York, at the door of The Continental. Cormac is busy; he basically persuades an assassin to kill himself because, “doing business” is not allowed inside the walls of the hotel.

Winston hasn’t seen Cormac in years, but he knows how ruthless the old man can be. Cormac wants him to find Frankie, because Winston’s big brother has “something that holds this entire establishment together,” Cormac says. Winston, who’s estranged from his brother, refuses to do Cormac’s bidding, but it seems that Cormac is going to use Winston as bait, anyway.

Meanwhile, a police detective named KD (Mishel Prada) is investigating a weapons ring, and she tails the buyer, whose fingers just got shot off by Miles (Hubert Point-Du Jour) and Lou (Jessica Allain) the people he was buying the guns from. She’s about to pursue him into The Continental, but her boss, Mayhew (Jeremy Bobb), cuts her off. He knows what goes on in there, and knows that even the cops shouldn’t mess with it. KD wonders if she’s just there to have sex with him and not do her job. She’s also looking for Frankie, who she calls a “ghost.”

Winston goes to the gang he and Frankie used to run with, led by a guy he calls Uncle Charlie (Peter Greene). Charlie hasn’t seen Frankie in months, but he does give him a lead, and lets Winston borrow his prized Mustang.

After the incident where they almost got killed, Lou wants to get out of the gun-running business, but Miles knows that they have to get rid of the product they have. All she wants to do is keep her Chinatown karate dojo open, which is why they’re selling the guns to begin with.

Winston goes to the dojo and finds out from Miles that Frankie may have been seen in Alphabet City, where he finds Frankie and Yen, whom he never heard about, holed up in a theater. After some initial conflict, Winston tells him that Cormac is after him and he wants to help Frankie and Yen escape. Frankie shows him what Cormac is after: An ancient coin press.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Continental is a prequel to the John Wick series of action movies, with the connections being Winston (played by Ian McShane in the films) and Cormac’s right-hand-man, Charon (Ayomide Adegun in the series, the late Lance Reddick in the films).

Our Take: There is a story somewhere in The Continental: From The World Of John Wick — which was originally developed by Greg Coolidge, Kirk Ward and Shawn Simmons for Starz, but the show ended up on Peacock — but we were a bit hard-pressed to put our finger on exactly what it was. It definitely centers on Winston, who was pulled out of the criminal life by Frankie taking the fall for him, but now gets sucked back in. But there are so many characters and so many stories in this 3-part miniseries that it’s hard to tie the various threads together into a cohesive story.

One of the things we also wondered about is the presence of Gibson as Cormac. He’s in three scenes in the 90-minute first episode, and it seems like his role could have been played by any number of character actors who regularly play mob bosses and thugs. Yet, he’s the top-billed name in the credits. We get it: Gibson, despite his recent history, is still a big A-list name and the rest of the cast is relatively unknown. But there was nothing about what he brought to Cormac in the first episode that made us think that the blowback that the showrunners are getting by casting him in the role was going to be worth it.

In a lot of ways, the show feels like it’s a 2-hour movie that was made to fit into a 4.5-hour miniseries. Instead of a concentrated story about Winston and how he came to be ensnared in the world of The Continental, we have side stories involving Miles and Lou, as well as KD. In reality, we don’t need a scene of KD screwing her boss, for instance, if all she is is the cop who is going after Frankie. There are other ways to shape her character than a gratuitous sex scene. And does the story of Lou and Miles doing this “one last job” to save the dojo all that necessary?

The other padding factor is the action scenes, where there’s an extremely high body count. Most of the deaths we see are via gunshots to random thugs’ heads that look like they’re more from a video game than a live-action series. Could they have been cut back a bit? Probably, but when you have the space to kill more random thugs, why not use it, right?

With lots of stylish visuals, kinetic camera work that includes scenes that are supposed to look continuous (but have subtle edits that indicate otherwise) and needle drops that are fun but sometimes a bit on the nose given the vague ’70s setting, The Continental has a lot to see and hear. But sometimes being stylish papers over a lot of story flaws, and this might be the case here.

Sex and Skin: The aforementioned scene where KD is screwing Mayhew.

Parting Shot: Winston arrives with an injured Yen at the dojo, and when Lou and Miles answer, he says, “I need guns. Lots of guns.”

Sleeper Star: Ayomide Adegun, who plays Charon, is one of those actors who just looks steadily competent in his scenes, but you know he has some big scene that he’ll just nail at some point in the series.

Most Pilot-y Line: Cormac tells Charon to get some residents to help retrieve the coin press: “Get me the weirdos. Yeah, you’re right, they’re all weirdos.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Continental feels like it’s more for John Wick completists than fans of well-plotted action series.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.