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Shaken But Not Stirred
It’s difficult to write an objective review about a movie that’s a sequel to an iconic movie. And even more difficult (for the producers) is to make a sequel that can at least equal the original. The production team has to make a movie that stands on its own conceptually, but at the same time, throws a few bones to the fans of the first one by including elements from the first film. Unfortunately, John Wick: Chapter 2 doesn’t quite pull it off. Don’t get me wrong. JW:C2 is a good movie, but all the way through it I kept thinking, The first John Wick was better.
There are some well-crafted scenes in this film, but a lot of them don’t feel quite right. A few of the minor characters are a little flat like they were added to the world of Wick as an afterthought. That was one of the magical things about the original JW. ALL the minor characters from Charlie the Cleaner to Francis the Doorman seemed to be three dimensional, human beings. Sure, they didn’t have all that much screen time, but the characters felt right as if they had a life that extended beyond the scenes they were in. However, in JW:C2, the gun shop owner and the Italian tailor character just seemed out of place like the characters were written right before the director shot the scene. All the minor characters felt more like caricature rip-offs from the glamorous world of James Bond and not the earthy, fully realized characters that populate the seedy, underworld of John Wick.
And the fight scenes that were spectacular, extremely well crafted to fit the environment in which they were being fought in JW1, looking more like extended games of WAC-A-MOLE. The Catacombs of Rome scene where John Wick battles a billion bad guys (it seemed like a billion), was nothing more than a first-person shooter game with the “bad guys” lining up and strolling through the combs just for the pleasure of being shot to death by the title character.
And the bad guys? Here’s the thing. In the first movie ALL the bad guys who fought with John Wick seemed to be good at killing other people; John Wick was just way, way better. In JW:2 the bad guys seemed to be unqualified. After watching bad guy after bad guy run into an open area and get shot down by John Wick, I started to wonder how in the hell did they get their bad guy jobs? They sure as hell don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, come on! In one of the final shootouts, a tweet-bounty is put on Johnny boy’s head (Hey, didn’t they do something like that in the first one?), and every hit man on planet Wick answers the call. Not one looked at the tweet and thought, “Are you crazy? You want me to go up against Baba Yaga, the guy you send to kill the fucking boogeyman; you want me to go up against him? No way, José Ferrer!"
There are a few sequels that in my mind equal or maybe even surpass the production quality of the original films: Aliens (1986), Godfather II (1974) and recently, The Lego Batman Movie (2017). No, I won’t argue about which was better than the original they were based on, but they all are at least as good as their original while being an “original” in their own right.
GRADE: 86 points out of 100 = 86% = B+
