John Wick: Chapter 2
Director: Chad Stahelski
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Ruby Rose
Four stars
Chad Stahelski's 2014 hitman thriller John Wick caught many people unawares. As stealthy an operator as its protagonist, the blend of hardcore action and gunplay gave Keanu Reeves his coolest role since The Matrix.
As the titular assassin, forced out of retirement after Russian gangsters kill the dog left to him by his late wife, Reeves's rock-hard rampage was a balletic throwback to the days of John Woo's The Killer. The inevitable sequel starts, as it should, mid-action – all squealing tyres and gunshots.
Wick cleans up the last of his East-European foes, returns home and has just re-cemented his stash of guns in his basement floor when the doorbell rings. It is Santino (Riccardo Scamarcio), a former employer who wants Wick to carry out another hit – on his sister.
Wick wants to refuse but the strict code of the underworld will not allow this.
And so he heads to Rome as death’s emissary (where one denizen asks slyly: “Are you here for the Pope?”).
Derek Kolstad returns as screenwriter for the sequel, and there is something of a graphic-novel quality about it. Wick and his fellow criminals operate in what almost feels like a parallel universe, where the law does not (or cannot) touch them, where hotels are dedicated to exclusively serving their needs, and on every street corner lurks an assassin (one is even dressed like a sumo wrestler).
When a price is put on Wick's head, the message is conveyed by tattoo-clad telephonists working in an office that looks like something out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
Returning director Chad Stahelski delights in emphasising this and expanding on the first film’s mythology (returning characters include the concierge from assassins- only hotel The Continental, played by Lance Reddick).
Matrix fans will get a kick out of seeing Reeves reunited with Laurence Fishburne, who plays the leader of a gang of vagabond hitmen hiding in New York's alleyways and subway stations.
In the end, though, this is the type of film that lives and dies by its action sequences.
It really shifts into top gear after Reeves heads to Italy and buys a consignment of weapons, a suit and the plans to some conveniently located catacombs – and starts eliminating enemies with alarming regularity.
While most are cannon-fodder, he meets his match in his target's main bodyguard, played by rapper-turned-actor Common, and a female killer who only talks in sign language, played by Aussie Orange Is The New Black star Ruby Rose. It is all complete nonsense, of course — but gloriously so.
There is such commitment to this world, to the action and to John Wick’s predicament, as he finds himself bound by codes of obedience and yet cast further and further into the margins.
True, it lacks the surprise factor of the original, and also the emotional pull (his wife and dog very much are in the background this time).
But if you want to see Keanu back in bloodthirsty action, this is the sequel for you.
artslife@thenational.ae
