‘John Wick: Chapter 2’ Review: Keanu Reeves Kills Again in Action-Packed Sequel
The same key creative team is back for “Chapter Two” as well: writer Derek Kolstad and stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski, going solo after sharing helming duties with David Leitch last time, which means aesthetic continuity is held, even if that element of devilish surprise (this is all happening because somebody stole his car and killed his dog?) is missing.
The rules dictate Wick accept the mission, which sends him to the Eternal City and the Italian version of the Continental, one of the “John Wick” universe’s niftiest touches, a swanky hotel chain for hired guns with a lethally-enforced rule against conducting business on its grounds.
No, but expect a ritualistic laying on of hands, knives and gun barrels from here on out as Wick’s assignment leads to a high-priced bounty on his head, and the old stirrings of revenge against those who done him wrong.
The second hour of “Chapter 2” — save a mildly amusing “Matrix” reunion with a theatrical Laurence Fishburne as the subterranean leader of a cadre of hobo killers — is primarily an exhilarating gauntlet of martial arts/gun-fu assault, climaxing in a museum showdown inside a Welles-ian hall of mirrors.
[...] these are the musical numbers we’ve been waiting for, mapped out in long, economically filmed takes of ferocious close-quarters fighting and firing that Reeves performs with a soulfully mean élan you could trace back to Lee Marvin’s heyday.
The filmmakers know when to lace in genre-tweaking humor, too, as when Reeves and Common are on different levels of a crowded public concourse, nonchalantly poking guns out of their coats and squeezing off shots at each other that nobody else notices.
If Scamarcio isn’t as fun a villain as Michael Nyqvist’s bemused mob head was last time around, there’s still Ian McShane dripping authority as the Continental’s New York face, and the ever-present system of underworld codes and customs that lend a daftly enjoyable, old-world pomposity to it all.