John Wick 2 Review by Spencer Moleda
Life must be hard for John Wick. He wants an average life but seems utterly unqualified for one. “Terminated three men with a single pencil” isn’t exactly a lucrative addition to one’s CV. He trudges, ever onward, sniffing out some semblance of normalcy one bloody headshot at a time. God love him.
This is a high-octane action picture where style reigns supreme, but beneath the white-knuckle spectacle lies something resembling a soul. This is no complex examination of human struggle, but it at least respects its characters enough to more in them than props for set pieces. At the end of the day, we like John Wick because he strives for change even as his life seems to bullishly chase him — he may be done with the past, but like the best action heroes, the past isn’t about to give up without a fight.
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is ready to follow in the footsteps of David Cronenberg’s Tom Stall — he plans to escape his world, bury himself in the dirt, and cultivate a new whole man from the sour ashes of his cold-blooded self. He almost gets away with it. Almost. Until one day, an old associate, Santino (Riccardo Scamarcio) shows up at his front door with a marker, a blood oath made between two fellow assassins that must be fulfilled when evoked. John refuses, leading Santino to blow up his house and everything he owns, except his dog. The dog lives in this one.
John Wick must go on the classic one-last-mission-gone-wrong. I’ll leave the “how” to you, the viewer, but it’s dire enough that the entire criminal underworld, hiding in plain sight at every moment. This creates a unique interest in a relatively routine plot. We know John Wick will engage in incendiary fisticuffs with a slew of baddies, but who will attack first? And from what angle? There is a scene early on in which John walks through a moonlit city bustling with people. And every single one of them could potentially be out to kill him.
If the film proves nothing else, it’s that Keanu Reeves will go down as one of the great unsung screen presences of his day. He’s occasionally miscast in roles that don’t take advantage of unique aura, one of stunted spiritual understanding. However, when he gets a role like John Wick, he proves why he’s the star that he is. He conveys a stunted and repressed conflict with nothing but a stare, making him sympathetic even at his most ruthless.
But of all people, sliding into a close second is Common, a rapper. The line of successful rappers-turned actors is embarrassingly short, but Common doesn’t use his hip-hop persona as a kind of masculine front. Here he plays a body guard who was betrayed by John Wick. In the warmth of his face, we see a man who understands why John Wick did what he did, but he also realizes that he did it period, and as long as he’s alive, he has a debt to fulfill.
I never saw the original John Wick, so perhaps those who did won’t be so sideswiped by the sequel’s brutal violence. I was, but it isn’t quite gratuitous. It lends weight to the idea that John Wick’s true nature lies in what he’s good at, not what he aspires to be. Nevertheless, it’s a shocking thing to see so many heads pop like water balloons in such giddy succession and the chic orchestration of every bullet and splintered bone does nothing but cast you into further doubt.
Director Chad Stahelski knows how to construct a film that both thrills you and leaves enough bitter aftertaste to churn up questions, if only in weak flashes. For a film as furiously enjoyable as this one, that’s all I suspect you’ll need.
