2014’s John Wick was a revenge movie where Keanu Reeves goes after the cocksuckers who killed his beagle puppy. John Wick Chapter 2 does not attempt to up the ante in this regard, thus dashing my hopes that by a potential Chapter 5 the titular hitman would find his rescue operation razed to the ground, dead dogs strewn willy-nilly among the flames.
Aside from the unique nature of its plot-revving victim, John Wick was notable for its action scenes, which were better than anything in mainstream American action movies, i.e. superhero movies. In the pantheon of [straightens glasses] Good Action Movies, though, John Wick is pretty bland stuff, getting by mostly on the elusive charisma of Keanu Reeves and a handful of solid gunfights.
John Wick Chapter 2 is over 20 minutes longer than John Wick. It is, undeniably, more John Wick, in the way that everything just becomes a franchise now. The first film was obsessed with an internal mythology of its own invention: It wasn’t a remake, and wasn’t based on a comic or an anime. It just sincerely thought that a movie about an international guild of assassins with an arcane bushido-esque code and, uh, their own special currency consisting of gold ingots was a really cool idea.
John Wick himself is ostensibly as a force of nature, a literal boogeyman, a platinum-grade badass, and the script wastes no opportunity to tell you this: within minutes, Peter Stormare, his hair dyed jet-black, is hissing at length about John Wick, a man of “sheer fuckin’ will.” Chapter 2 is all about John Wick being good at fighting. First he shoots people in the leg, and then the head. There is almost nothing to his character beyond his facility with firearms, his affinity for dogs and his dead wife.
Director Chad Stahelski and his assembled crew are not up to the task of matching the best action movies at a very specific trick: John Woo’s The Killer, for example, is no involved character study. But it’s absolutely rich with style and expressivity. It becomes a sort of ballet of formal elegance put to violent ends.
John Wick Chapter 2 is obsessed with looking cool, and it only succeeds when it embraces its outre tendencies: A baroque monologue set in a bathroom straight out of a Guillermo Del Toro movie, a gunfight bisected by a gushing fountain in a moment of calm, Ian McShane delivering a fiery speech about vengeance while standing in front of a massive statue of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction.
The movie opens with a Buster Keaton shoutout, but too rarely does it have that kind of wit. Aside from these touches, it’s mostly for people who complain about how few times the heroes reload in action movies. John Wick? He reloads a lot. Hand-to-hand fights are shot in flat unbroken medium shots; shootouts are captured by a chest-high camera wading calmly through the fray. There is no kineticism, no emotion, no expressionism. By the climax, which hurtles through a mirror-heavy art installation, we are not rapt to an awesome display of physical ability and stylistic mastery. We are wondering how the filmmakers managed to keep the camera out of the reflections.
John Wick Chapter 2
2.5 out of 5 stars
Rated R. Directed by Chad Stahelski.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Common, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Ruby Rose.
Opens Feb. 10.
This article appears in Feb 2-9, 2017.
