In “John Wick: Chapter 2,” the international superkiller wears black turtlenecks straight out of L’Uomo Vogue, has a tattoo in Latin and calls his gun dealer his “sommelier.” He’s the world’s most pretentious hit man.
Hence the “chapter” in the title, as though anyone will confuse this packet of chase-and-shoot with literature. Keanu Reeves sure is a strange choice when pretension is your thing, though: All these years later and he still delivers each sentence with a slight head spasm, as though an invisible puppeteer has to jerk the words out of him.
Or maybe he just can’t believe the movie he’s in — the kind of flick where someone hires you to kill his sister, then tries to kill you because you refused, then tries to kill you because you obeyed.
The makers of “JW:C2,” which was directed by Chad Stahelski (who created much of the stunt action in “The Matrix”), call their gun fights “gun fu” and their car chases “car fu” but didn’t work much on their plot fu, which depends heavily on some balderdash involving the rules of a swanky global assassins club called Il Continentale. Wick is a former member who must honor its code by carrying out one last hit. There’s no killing on club property, so, naturally, when Wick and his foil Cassian (Common) are busy trying to slaughter each other in Il Continentale’s Rome outpost, they take a break and buy each other a drink.
John spends the movie killing the club-linked hoods, then discovers there’s a $7 million bounty on his head that, in an amusing New York scene, results in an alert that inspires every hobo and street musician to take a crack at killing him. No matter: He wears the world’s first fashion-forward bulletproof suit, so naturally everyone extends him the courtesy of not shooting him in the face, and no one else has any kind of defenses, unless you count leaping suddenly into the path of his bullets. I’ve met blades of grass that put up more resistance to the average lawnmower.
The first “John Wick” was taut and nasty, a potent slug of B-movie. This one is so enamored of its own extravagance that, on more than one occasion, I was reminded of “Zoolander 2.” According to press notes, there are 141 Wick victims all told — and the fact that this movie thinks “quantity of killing” is a major selling point tells you a lot. By that logic, the story of a guy, an ant infestation and a can of Raid would be irresistible.
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