Wait, say the skeptics, isn't it simply Keanu Reeves, as the titular character, shooting, stabbing, kicking and punching bad guys once he is not mistreatment different vehicles to travel Mad easy lay on his enemies? Well, yes, it's that too. And yet this sequel – with the star at his absolute best because the questionable booger United Nations agency once killed 3 men with a pencil – crashes on the far side the borders of typical B-movie nihilism. Chapter 2 finds one thing excitingly existential in this tale of a lone hand trying to require a exchange a world gone batshit crazy. Deliriously fast and funny, this wild thing is set in motion by director Chad Stahelski with a dance ability to rival La La Land, if that Oscar-bound musical had a body count.
The plot is cleverly designed by film writer Derek Kolstad to go full throttle. Last time, Wick tried to retire from the assassin business and settle down with the missus. Then she died, a bummer made worse once Russian thugs steal Wick's prize 1969 pony and kill his puppy, a gift from his late wife. What's a gallant to do? Go on a rampage, of course. Chapter Two picks up with Wick subsidence in once more at his sleekly trendy Long Island home, this time with a replacement pup. But the past pulls him back in, this time via the lethal Italian criminal Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio). Santino wants Wick to fly to Rome and execute his sister, Gianna (Claudia Gerini), so he will take her place at the "High Table," a secret gathering spot for the criminal elite. Wick makes his frowny face. But malefactor has his marker and in the shooter occupation, you don't welsh on a marker.
The code of honor among scum is one of the movie's wittiest conceits, along with the idea of underworld syndicates concealing in plain sight. It's house policy at the Continental, a chic Manhattan edifice for hitmen and ladies run with elegant dispatch by Winston (a delicious Ian McShane). There is to be no violence on the premises, ever; you break the rule at your peril. Otherwise, all bets are off in Rome wherever Wick tangles with Cassian (a stellar Common), Gianna's security honcho, and Ares (Ruby Rose), the mute head of Santino's goon squad.
A "gun-fu" battle at the ancient Baths of Caracalla, is spectacular; ditto a shootout at a hall of mirrors that echoes Orson Welles's The woman From Shanghai. And it's jaw-dropping when Wick and Cassian go at it back in New royal family, where Santino has place out a international contract on our single army, bringing each killer out of the shadows. For help, Wick turns reluctantly to an previous enemy, the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) – yup, Neo and deity reunite. It's a setup for Wick's climactic duel at the planet Trade Center subway hub.
To call these thunderous sequences thrilling is to inform the case. Reeves trained for weeks in judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and it shows. Stahelski, who started as Reeves' stunt double on the Matrix films, has a keen eye for a way action defines character. Working with the talented cameraman Dan Laustsen (Crimson Peak), whose neon lighting is contrarily insidious, the director fills every in. of his dazzling widescreen compositions. No hollow digital dazzle, green-screen trickery or caffeinated editing, just long takes of actors moving with suave exactitude and grace. Reeves, a throwback to the great urban center action stars, is poetry in bruising motion. He's a cowboy. He's a samurai. He's rock and roll. What are you waiting for? And once do we have a tendency to get Chapter 3?
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