The Continental is open for business on Peacock, but should you check in?

The Continental is a new miniseries set in the world of John Wick, but serving as a prequel. The show takes place in the 1970s and establishes the history of the iconic hotel for the assassins of the John Wick world known as the continental. 

The first of three episodes begins with a heist being conducted on a vault in the Continental by Frankie (Ben Robson), who aims to steal a chest containing a coin press. The heist doesn’t go as planned and quickly turns into a shootout as Frankie makes his escape out of the building. 

We then cut to a young Winston Scott (Colin Woodell), the man who would eventually become manager of the Continental in the John Wick franchise, discussing an investment plan with a wealthy man about developing car parks to accompany the economic boom in the London area. As it turns out, Winston was in league with a woman to scam the wealthy man out of his investment money. After their scam succeeds they go to a hotel room for some celebratory coitus, after which Winston is attacked and kidnapped by people who work for Cormac O’Connor (Mel Gibson), the man who currently owns and operates the Continental.

Cormac is accompanied by Charon (Ayomide Agodun), who aids him in managing the Continental. Charon is a ruthless man who wants to know what happened to Frankie (who turns out to be Winston’s brother), so he sends Winston out to track Frankie down for him. 

Next, we meet a woman named KD (Mishel Prada), preparing for her day as a detective. She is following an arms deal trying to track down the supplier Frankie Scott, but her superiors interfere with her investigation after she tails someone escaping the arms deal gone bad. The arms deal fails as Lou (Jessica Allain), Miles (Hubert Point-Du Jour) and Lemmy (Adam Shapiro) trick the man who conducted the deal with rigged bullets as he tries to kill them. These three worked with Frankie in the past and are trying to make their own way in the world. Next, Winston is seen meeting up with some old family in search of Frankie, and goes to his Uncle Charlie (Peter Greene) who gives him a lead and car to pursue Frankie. 

The first episode shows off the web of the underworld that John Wick would end up working in on all fronts: police, assassins, arms dealers, etc. We also meet an Adjudicator (Katie McGrath), who pursues Frankie on behalf of the organization who runs the assassin world in order to retrieve the stolen Coin Press. The series builds some lore and history for the John Wick world for those fans interested in that. However despite the action being pretty good, it is noticeably worse than the movies’ level of quality.

The direction and acting are good but nothing particularly praise-worthy in comparison to the films. I’m sure it will be sufficient for fans of the world-building of John Wick but I hope as the remaining episodes come out the show finds a way to make itself unique and stand out instead of just being lesser-quality John Wick product. 

The Continental will have two more episodes, to be released on Friday, September 29th and Friday, October 6th available to watch on Peacock.