Chad Stahelski’s sequel stages its gunfights with more clarity and care than almost anything in the genre, and it knows it. The plot is a chain of errands and the killing blurs after ninety minutes, but the craft is real and the fun is honest.
Chad Stahelski’s 2014 original was a small, sad revenge film with the cleanest gunfights anyone had staged in years. The sequel keeps the gunfights and lets go of the small and the sad. John Wick: Chapter 2 is a 122-minute tour of a criminal world with its own hotels, currency, tailors and rulebook, and Derek Kolstad, who wrote both films, is far more taken with the rulebook this time than with the man. We enjoyed it a great deal and cared about almost none of it.
Stahelski was a stunt coordinator before he was a director, and it shows. The fights are staged in long takes with the camera far enough back to see feet, hips and hands, so when Reeves throws a man over his shoulder and shoots him on the way down we can see that it is Reeves doing it. Evan Schiff cuts to clarify, not to hide: a shot lasts until the move is finished. Dan Laustsen lights Rome in amber and the catacombs by torch, floods New York with magenta and blue neon, and ends in a gallery of mirrors and moving light where it is hard to tell a man from his reflection.
Reeves is the reason it holds. He plays a man who is tired, moving as if every stair costs him something, and the script gives him a few hundred words and lets the body say the rest. The jokes are dry and mostly about the world’s manners: a sommelier who discusses pistols in the language of wine, a tailor who asks about tactical lining. We laughed out loud at the subway fight, in which Reeves and Cassian (Common), Gianna’s bodyguard, shoot at each other with silenced pistols through a crowd of commuters who barely look up, and we were slightly ashamed of ourselves, which we suspect is the point.
The trouble is that Kolstad has fallen for his own furniture. The first film mentioned a hotel and a gold coin and let us guess the rest. This one explains the marker, the High Table, and a network of beggars and pigeons run by Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King from a rooftop, and every explanation is delivered as if it were scripture. Fishburne enjoys himself hugely. But the more solemn the film gets, the harder it is to care about a seat at a table we had not heard of half an hour earlier.
And there is too much of it. Somewhere past the ninety-minute mark, in a stretch where Reeves works through what seems like every hired gun in New York, we noticed we had stopped watching the fights and started watching the lighting. The pattern does not change: draw, fire, reload, fire, throw, fire. It is done with real skill every time, and after a while the skill becomes routine. Riccardo Scamarcio’s Santino is a plausible, oily villain early on and then spends the back half sending other men to die. Ruby Rose’s Ares, his bodyguard, is mute and signs her taunts, which is the one fresh idea the villains get.
Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard score it with grinding guitar and a low electronic pulse that suits the neon and wears thin whenever the film sits still. Kevin Kavanaugh’s production design is the film’s second lead: the Continental’s brass and marble, the Bowery King’s rooftop of cages, the Roman Continental where Franco Nero’s Julius asks whether John has come for the Pope. Luca Mosca cuts Reeves’s suits close enough that we believe the tailor when he says they will stop a bullet, a claim the film then tests a few hundred times.
Few people staging gunfights in Hollywood do it with this clarity, and against its genre the film sits near the top. Against the first film it is bigger, louder, better lit and less involving, because that one was about a man who had lost his wife and his dog and this one is about a man who owes a favour. See it on the largest screen you can, and go in knowing that the last forty minutes will be more of the first eighty. It runs 122 minutes and carries a 15.
