John Wick 2: The Big Critic

Successful surprise of 2014, John Wick released comedian the lovers of action and the career of Keanu Reeves. Despised by one of his two directors, swollen with a block and with a budget, but also a wait tenfold, will his suite do even better?

Let’s not delude ourselves. For sympathetic though he was, the first John Wick was more of the unexpected papillote than the great action movie that was a little quick to the clouds. Thanks to the passive co-ordinators of the directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, as well as a series of iconic and gently debilitating ideas about the mythology of the hired killer, the footage easily climbed over the melee Of the actuators to the parkinsonian camera.

A good treat, but John Wick: Chapter 2 had an interest in severely muscling his game to win. And that falls well, that is precisely what this sequel proposes to us, which surpasses his eldest in all fields. As soon as it opened, the film strives to pass the previous chapter for a curling championship version handisport.

While bastons and shootings remain as feline as they are elegant thanks to a mixture of choreography and cutting particularly clever, they are now of an extreme inventiveness. Their playful dimension thus plays full, each opponent, decor or rebound radically modifying the approach of the staging.

We are then brinqueballing a “silent” gunfight in the middle of a shopping center, a deadly ballet where the pencil impresses, passing by a waterfall that stretches along an impressive Roman staircase, reminding us that The simplest devices are sometimes the most spectacular . Again, the long, impeccably connected plans, always thought to put forward the physical and martial performances of the actors, are the rule.

Photo Keanu Reeves”Italian horror, are you there?”

A principle that befits Keanu Reeves , always as pleasant in Droopy cocaine and retchard , now a big fan of macaroni. He is one of the few Hollywood actors skilled in physical combat and weapon handling , and offers a series of cascades and jubilant pyrotechnic juggling . It is necessary to see the dashing fifty-year-old immobilize a nasty rital with a butt in the larynx, while reloading a still smoking Benelli, before giving the last sacraments to blow of molten lead, to understand how Chad Stahelski and its actor master the Cinegic violence.

BATTLEFIELD OF THE GEARS OF THE RAID OF WAR
John Wick: Chapter 2 is an intense show and race, but above all a cinephile culture broth . His climax with kaleidoscopic airs is an obvious nod to La Dame de Shanghai , when a perfectly unexpected suicide scene takes us between Bava and Lynch, the time of a funereal interlude, which astonishes by its morbid poetry. In a few moments, the film even glances at the hard-boiled polar from the 70s, as a totally desperate and paranoid conclusion, a sign that Stahelski , if he wants to entertain , does not take his character lightly.

Photo Ruby Rose”Mirror, my beautiful mirror …”

Finally, the influences of The Raid , in the tempo as the mechanics of the confrontations, but also of the video game (the third person shooters innervate literally the cutting of the film), finish making the film a delicious pot rotten of excellent influences.

However, the story is never taken too seriously. John Wick is always quick to ogle on the cartoon side, especially during his opening, or his transitions, thus avoiding the trap of the fireman rococo that his Roman decor based on betrayal and vengeance. The same is true of the incredible International Assassins, mentioned in the first episode. Aware of its kitsch potential , the screenplay plays this card thoroughly balloons, building both a distinctive universe and a fantasy that dodges the ridiculous .

MENU OVERKILL MAXI BEST-OF
But to over-satisfy his viewer, John Wick: Chapter 2 fails to stifle it. Thus, the film is too long a quarter of an hour, the fault with a handful of twists, or a few clashes, certainly virtuosos, but spread too much to avoid repetitions. It is a pity that some of the fighting becomes (despite a rain of excellent ideas) very easy to anticipate, due to their excessive length .

Similarly, the franchise suddenly became the place to be, one feels that the inflation of characters is not always justified. Like the second role played by Laurence Fishburne , which cruelly recalls that the actor is a living pub for early retirement , while stressing how much the sequence dedicated to him is perfectly useless in terms of narration. And in a film of action, inventive, intense, and plastically successful, spend ten minutes alongside a pigeon breeder under adulterated Tranxene, it is long. Very long.

Nothing of all this durably begins the pleasure felt before John Wick boosted, but these with damaging sides forbid the film to rise to the level of total success that it aspired. It remains a totally enjoyable action film, of unusual generosity and elegance.