Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars
Bottom Line: A kind of weak story. More than makes up for it with brilliantly choreographed violence. I mean seriously, it’s almost art.
As the ticket taker ripped our tickets in half when we entered the theater, he emphatically proclaimed, “Best. Sequel. Ever.” He was wrong. But if you go to see the movie, you can understand where he was coming from. Keanu Reeves is the action hero you have been waiting for. Dude just mixes it up for 2 hours straight.
The second movie appears to start shortly after the first movie left off. John Wick (Keanu Reeves) still needs to get his car back. He does so in glorious fashion. The action scenes in this movie were made with love and meticulous attention to detail. It is a dance and an orgy of violence and destruction. The comments interspersed by the Russian crime boss are just icing on the cake. You know right away that you are in for one heck of a ride.
But then comes the story. It’s…meh. It gets really quickly into the mythos of the John Wick universe, which was a large part of the pleasure of the first movie and is still pretty cool in the second, but then it wraps a ridiculous story around it. In simplest terms possible so as not to give anything away, a crime boss forces Wick to perform another assassination, because he’s an assassin and there wouldn’t be a movie without it, and then immediately double crosses Wick when the task is complete. We can ignore the fact that the assassination was ridiculously easy despite Wick’s protestations that it was impossible, because movie. But if you have this large underground of assassins I would think that very high on the list of rules is that you can’t then go and kill your hired help. Apparently not.
Ignore all that though! John Wick kicks some real ass in this film and it is glorious to watch. This movie has probably the best action sequences since “The Matrix”, also starring Keanu Reeves. And it finally answers my question from my original review as to why it ended so weird. Because the second was going to start where the first left off. And the third looks like it will do likewise.