Keanu makes Wick-ed return
Sequel maintains fine line between punch and punchline
A middling box office winner and a critical hit from 2014, John Wick followed two rules to guarantee its success. One, let a stuntman direct. Two, do not let Keanu Reeves act!
Chapter 2, opening Friday, doesn’t mess with the formula. Chad Stahelski (Reeves’ Matrix stunt double) returns to direct. (His co-director from the first
John Wick, David Leitch, is off prepping Deadpool 2.) And Reeves mostly runs, jumps, shoots and punches his way through this violent sequel.
When he does pause to remember his dearly departed wife, his emotional recollections look more like constipation.
But if you wanted tender moments, you’d be streaming The
Lake House. John Wick is an assassin, now retired — a killer so dangerous he is said to have once dispatched three men in a bar with a pencil.
(Someone in this movie claims that story has been “watered down,” though it’s not clear whether this means Wick killed more than three people, or that he didn’t need the pencil.)
The first movie was built around the line “You stole my car and you killed my dog.” Chapter 2 is
Finnegans Wake in comparison — Wick is approached by Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio). Santino wants his sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini) dead so he can take her place at some sort of global crime syndicate. When Wick refuses, Santino burns his house down.
Thank heavens his new dog survives the blaze.
As it is, the now-homeless Wick travels to Italy to kill Gianna and get his life back. This necessitates one of the best shopping montages ever, with Wick visiting a tailor who offers a cotton/Kevlar blend — the suit breathes, and after the gunfight so will you! There’s also an armourer (Peter Serafinowicz) who rattles off the “robust” qualities of a Glock 34 as though discussing a ’53 Bordeaux. Also gives new meaning to the phrase “the next round is on me.”
There’s some clever editing at play in these scenes, repeated later in the film when Wick squares off against a homicidal sumo wrestler, a murderous busker and a few more besides. We may not be
certain which adversaries have been conquered and in which order, although as long as Wick has access to a pencil you know he’ll be all right.
His most persistent opponent is Gianna’s chief bodyguard, Cassian, played by Common. Their battles provide opportunities for the movie to wink at its own violence.
There’s a hilarious scene in which the two combatants attach silencers to their weapons and tone down their gunplay so much that their shootout in a crowded train station goes unnoticed by New York commuters. And a hand-to-hand dustup on a staircase suggests “fight or flight” doesn’t have to be a choice: You can do both.
John Wick: Chapter 2 works well by letting the audience laugh at such excesses, reminding us there is a fine line between a punch and a punchline. It also plays to Reeves’s strengths on the screen. This is a man who raises inscrutability to an art form, and the movie includes such Matrix-y touches as dial telephones, a fight in an art exhibit called Reflections of the Soul and Laurence Fishburne.
Wick, who apparently speaks all languages including sign, Zens his way through the action like a non-existent knife through butter. And while you ponder that nugget, know that John Wick: Chapter 3 is in the planning stages, as is the possibility of a TV spinoff.
For its writer, Derek Kolstad, a sharpened pencil would also seem to be the only thing he needs to prosper.