Burl reviews John Wick Chapter 2! (2017)

Burl here, reviewing contemporary action! Yes, I recently watched John Wick Chapter 2, and, yes, Keanu Reeves from Speed is still playing the titular character, all shaggy and bearded and sad about his departed wife! Like its predecessor, it’s a slick and shiny action picture with gunfights that go one well past the point of absurdity, with so many henchmen falling to Wick’s gun-fu that you start to see the same guys popping out from behind doorways to be shot!

I’ll back up and explain the plot, insofar as there is one! John Wick is an unstoppable super-assassin living in a world apparently so populated with assassins that they have their own world-spanning secret culture, currency, ethics, accommodations and even their own style of subtitles! Ha ha! In the first picture, Wick, whose abiding desire is to “get out” of this crazy assassin’s life, is dragged back into it by the murder of his dog and theft of his beloved Mustang auto; in response he takes on the whole Russian mafia! As part two begins he’s bent on retrieving his auto, which he does, but immediately wrecks! After that the real plot begins: again he is dragged back in to the super-assassin lifestyle when he’s forced to fulfill a pledge! His house is exploded this time, and he is forced to do a killing, and wave upon wave of henchmen come running haplessly at him, and they fall before his pistols like wheat to the thresher!

The picture does its best to create this assassin world, presenting it as a completely separate and parallel society to our own, like the wizard-world in the Harry Potter stories! That’s fine and all, and it is compelling, but also very silly, ha ha! The filmmakers work very hard to create an atmosphere of decadent elegance, but it sometimes seems a little forced, like a movie version of the kind of gold-plate gaudiness you might find in Trump Tower or some equally horrible place, ha ha!

But they populate the world with plenty of worthwhile talent, there’s no denying that! Ian McShane from Too Scared to Scream plays the manager of the New York branch of the all-assassin motel, while Franco Nero from The Visitor and Django Unchained is his Roman counterpart! Laurence Fishburne from Fast Break, Death Wish II and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is the king of the hobo assassins, John Leguizamo from Die Hard 2 and Collateral Damage is Wick’s long-suffering mechanic, and Peter Stormare from Fargo has a cameo at the beginning, in which he sits behind a desk and attempts a Russian accent!

There are many figures in direct, as opposed to oblique opposition to Wick! An Italian fellow proves the main antagonist, but there is also Common, a rapmaster playing an aggrieved bodyguard, and Ruby Rose from The Meg, leading a small army of hipster barbers into the world’s most on-the-nose art installation for the Lady From Shanghai-inspired climax! And of course aside from the main baddies, there are seemingly hundreds of anonymous henchmen, who seem never to have been in a gunfight before judging by how they blunder into Wick’s path without a thought that he might be waiting around the corner ready to blast them with artillery of his own!

None of it is very realistic, and it’s all very stylish and impressive and silly and repetitive at the same time! Somehow, though it’s action-packed, it’s rarely very exciting, and the characters and the world in which they travel are as overwhelmingly fantastical as the planet Mongo in Flash Gordon! There’s nothing wrong with that in theory, but here the cleverness of the world-building, while undeniably present, is as synthetic as everything else! I won’t say I didn’t enjoy parts of the picture, but it never came together for me in the way it’s clearly supposed to! So I give John Wick Chapter 2 just two piles of garbage for hiding in!