Friday, January 27, 2023

Movie Review: John Wick Chapters 2

Stars: 1 out of 5
Pros: The first 15 minutes entertain
Cons: The rest is a repetitive violent mess with cardboard for characters
The Bottom Line:
Taking one last job
A boring action movie
Way too violent



“I Don’t Know If You Noticed, But You’ve got a Crack in Your Windshield.”

The friend who talked me into watching John Wick fully admitted that the first movie was bad, but he promised that John Wick Chapter 2 was a better movie.  While some things were better, overall, he was wrong.

This movie picks up just a few days after the last one ends.  John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is hoping to finally go back into retirement from his former life as an assassin when Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) shows up at his front door.  He’s heard that John is back as an assassin and therefore wants to call in the marker that John has with him.  It takes a little persuading, but John eventually does take on the assignment – going to Italy to kill Santino’s sister.  What will happen when John takes on the assignment?

With the first movie, I did complain about the motive for John going out committing all the murder and mayhem – revenge.  Here, he’s hired to go out and kill someone.  Ironically enough, I wasn’t as disturbed by his motive here as I was before.

However, the first movie had better and more action scenes.  This movie starts out with a great action scene.  Unrealistic?  Sure.  But lots of fun.  From there, it devolves into a video game movie.  What do I mean by that?  John takes on wave after wave of bad guys out to kill him, just like we would if we played a video game.  Heck, at one point, they are even showing three different fights that happened close together in time, but interspersed with each other.  One has to wonder why.  We never get the answer for that.  Late in the movie, we do get a creative location for a fight sequence, but it goes on much too long.

And that was the biggest problem with the movie – I got bored in an action movie.  It was the same thing over and over again, and I was counting down the seconds until it would end.  Yes, it ended on a cliffhanger, but I’m not sure I care.

Granted, that is partially the script’s fault.  Oh, don’t worry, the dialogue, what little there is of it, is better written than in the first movie.  I know, that isn’t saying much.  I felt like a little thought and effort was put into the dialogue here.  But we get nothing as far as character development.  As much as I thought John’s behavior was out of line in the first one (revenge and all), it at least gave him something relatable.  Here, he could easily be a mindless killing machine.  We just don’t care about him.

I said it was partially the script’s fault.  The other fault is the acting.  For me, Keanu Reeves is a hit or miss actor.  Here, he was a miss.  His dialogue came off as stiff, which again made it hard to care about the character.  For the most part the other actors are better, but the script doesn’t give them much to work with either.  Of course, most of the “characters” are just the nameless people that John Wick has to kill, so they don’t have much to work with.

Just in case you haven’t figured it out yet, this movie is violent.  And there are several scenes that are needlessly violent.  They could have toned it down, but by going over the top, it turned me off again.  There’s also quite a bit of foul language, although that seemed to die down as the violence ramped up in the second half.  Either way, this movie earns its R rating.

Honestly, there’s isn’t much to recommend the movie.  After the first 15 minutes, it devolves into a boring, gross mess.  Even mocking it with my friends didn’t make it enjoyable because it was so repetitive.  You will be best served by avoiding John Wick Chapter 2.

1 comment:

  1. My husband loves the John Wick movies, but I don't like them much at all.

    ReplyDelete

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