Revenge tales come in all shapes and sizes, but none more stylized or
satisfying than John Wick.
The first one came out of nowhere, banishing the doldrums of 2014
with a slick take on an old story: killer retires from the life to
brood, killer's dog gets iced by n'er-do-wells, killer un-retires to
take revenge in the only way he knows how. What John Wick did better
than anyone before him was make the kill. Here
was a man not only possessed of a certain set of skills, but a dapper
wardrobe and a balletic, beautiful fighting method that mixed martial
arts with impossible gun play (“gun-fu”, if you must). It was
violent and funny and over-the-top and exactly what you needed to
cure the winter blues. That Keanu Reeves lent all of his trademark
intensity and still-impressive physicality to the role made the experience all
the sweeter.
Chapter Two finds Keanu
Reeve's titular killer picking up mere days (hours?) from where he
left off: plowing through an army of Russian gangsters to avenge his
stolen car and belated pooch. We didn't need it – if you're
watching Two, odds are you've already seen One – but the opening
sequence offers a another primer into Wick's character (“He is a
man of singular focus”, “He killed three men with a pencil...a
fucking pencil...who
DOES that?”) and a hint or two how he earned the nickname “the
Boogyman”, often leaving hardened criminals too petrified to even
run at his approach. Despite a tiger stare and lethal moves, his
trademark gray suit is hardly ruffed, his collar is still crisp, and
his cuffs are only cosmetically bloodied. He looks in most respects
like a simple businessman, which is fitting given how, once the
personal stuff is out of the way, Chapter Two
becomes all about business. Even when the film's odious new nemesis
earns Wick's ire, it starts as a simple bad deal, a scuffing of the
accepted rules of killers and criminals that leaves both parties
aggrieved. In this case, Wick's emergence from retirement draws out
Santino D'Antonio, a rising-star crime lord who helped Wick disappear
the first time and now wants recompense for the favor. Wick is bound
to honor the request, even though it involves assassinating
D'Antonio's own sister and ensuring the unscrupulous turd ascends to
the upper reaches of syndicated crime. A savage gunfight and
deliciously predictable betrayal later, Wick becomes hunted by his
retainer, the victim of that pesky “you're a loose end”
rationale. Blood-drenched hijinks ensue.
The original Wick
offered us glimpses of a shadowy underworld where a vaguely-defined
society of stylish killers did business under our unsuspecting noses.
It was one of the coolest and initially jarring things about the
film, which began as a simple Taken-style
“shouldn'a fucked with him, mate” flick, only to veer into a
pseudo-fantasy with Illuminati-style assassins moving about,
garroting marks and sipping barrel-aged bourbon undetected. But it
ended up working perfectly in the context of the larger world it
presented – one in which a lone man can emerge unscathed from a
40-1 gunfight and bodies can pile up in public without mass
law-enforcement presence – and I loved the less-is-more approach
that left us guessing at the inner workings of the society's rules.
Wick 2 took a
calculated risk by going deeper into this nether-realm, exploring
their rules and regs a bit more thoroughly without ever pulling the
curtain completely aside. We only know both Wick and his client are
bound by centuries-old conventions, deviation from which results in
excommunication at best, death at worst. The catch is that
D'Antonio's ascent guarantees bad times for Wick's home turf of New
York, a place he hoped to
live in quiet obscurity before things went tits up. It proves an
effective ploy for keeping a man who has nothing left to lose
appropriately motivated once the bullets start to fly.
And boy do they fly.
Reeves is an accomplished (amateur)
martial artist and prides himself on rarely using stunt men. His
dedication – and endurance – shows in Chapter 2's
protracted combat scenes, which often see-saw from firefights to
close-quarters fisticuffs and back again in the span of seconds. The
camera stays on the action the whole time, rarely cutting away, never
resorting to tricksy jump-cuts and a multitude of cheap angles. The
result is a selection of utterly top-notch action scenes that leave
you out of breath and deeply impressed at the same time. You don't
go to these kinds of movies expecting to see artistry, but the care
and attention given to the fights truly can't be called anything
else.
Credit where it is due to the slow
moments, too, few and far between though they may be. Wick
takes all of its 2 hour 2 minute run time to lead us into a deep
enough place where we feel genuine concern how our hero is going to
get us out again. Reeves, who in his advancing age (52 and not
looking a day over 30) seems to know his strengths better than ever,
plays Wick as a man of very
few words, and delivers his lean dialogue with a queer, slightly
too-deliberate affectation, like a man awkward with speech and wholly
unused to the sound of his own voice. Only Australian beauty Ruby
Rose, as a mute villain-lieutenant, has fewer lines, which does not
prove a problem to any heterosexual male in the audience, though her
charisma still manages to fairly fly off the screen during her
too-few scenes. Rounding out the cast are two venerable vets, Ian
McShane as the exposition-spewing commissioner of killers and
Lawrence Fishburne as an eccentric overboss who offers Wick a
moment's respite. It was a joy to see the two Matrix
alums sharing the screen again (and can you believe they made that
movie almost twenty
years ago?!).
So does Wick get his revenge, set
the universe to rights once more? It's a question that will likely
spawn plenty of barroom conversations post-credits. Inevitably the
question is asked of him, “What are you fighting for?” For a guy
with no home, no wife, no car and no – well, he's got a new dog,
and he's sooooo cute, but nothing else – it seems a fair question.
If Wick still had demons to exorcise at the beginning of the film,
the only thing abundantly clear by the end is that he hasn't managed
to purge them all. Like all good second acts, the finale of this one
burns the whole village down and leaves us with nothing but ashes and
clean slates. Should a third Wick
come along – and here's hoping – our hero will find himself in a
very dark, very desperate place indeed.
But I think he's up to the task.
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