John Wick: Chapter 2
Archetypal Action Thriller | 122 Minutes | 2017 | United States
(1.5/4)
Director: Chad Stahelski | Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee | Writer: Derek Kolstad | Starring: Keanu Reeves, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ruby Rose, Claudia Gerini, Lance Reddick, Ian McShane | Music: Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard | Cinematography: Dan Laustsen | Editor: Evan Schiff
The hotly anticipated follow-up to what has already become a cult classic, in John Wick: Chapter 2 our eponymous hero goes to Rome, as the series curiously begins taking cues from Dan Brown and all things Da Vinci. There’s a dash of Underworld mixed in there too: this is a world where neon store fronts, modern art installations, subways and the original film’s streamlined desire for vengeance butt up against cobbled streets and catacombs, blood oaths and a sect-like criminal underground helmed by the twelve murky members of the ‘High Table’.
Already something has been lost. John Wick at least had its hook, a sleek and archetypal revenge narrative set off by the sentiment of a murdered puppy, which carried with it its own spiralling momentum. Here John Wick simply owes an old crime lord a debt: his quest is less personal, and his opponent lacks personality, although the grenade launcher which levels his home also takes out the photo frame housing a beloved family picture.
Cartoon interiors, crudely picturesque factories, bookshops, and clothing stores which serve as fronts for criminal trading, and the sterile minimalism of the Continental New York and John Wick’s apartment, clash uglily with real historical Rome. Beyond neon strips and ostentatious ambient lighting, there is nothing illuminating or even particularly cohesive about the film’s colour palette, and the locations feel second-hand rather than memorable.
The attempt is obviously to conjure something between heaven and hell, a purgatorial realm straddling glossily the Gothic, the Classic, and the computer-generated. Instead we get a pastiche of other films: Common, who plays the duty-bound bodyguard Cassian, at the end of a subway train fight sequence reminds one of a frozen Jack Nicholson in The Shining; and Laurence Fishburne, The Bowery King or King of the Gypsies, is a mesh between Home Alone 2‘s pigeon lady and a rooftop extra from On The Waterfront.
John Wick: Chapter 2 lacks the first film’s whirligig momentum. The choreography is crisply shot and contains the same novel mix of close-combat mixed martial arts, knife play, and gun fu dynamics. But none of it is thrilling, a couple of key sequences end in similar ways, and the only standouts are tongue-in-cheek implausible, set pieces where – back in New York – silencers benumb a subway crowd and where John Wick shoots indiscriminately through the Lincoln Center fountain.
Keanu Reeves barely has to emote as John Wick, and for all that he looks great and fights well, even without injury he runs like a hobgoblin. Plot contrivances exist for the means of more combat: at one point, John Wick the hitman effortlessly infiltrates his target’s lavish bathroom suite, but instead of retreating whence he came through the catacombs of Rome, he strolls out into a nightclub with inevitable consequences. One climactic set piece takes place in the ‘Reflections of the Soul’, a parodic but still leaden modern art exhibit replete with hall of mirrors. Ian McShane, who plays the manager of the Continental New York, is criminally underserved, but he does take pole position in time for the next installment.
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