D
Like a drive through Beverly Hills, watching John Wick Chapter 2 is a good reminder that a lot of people - and a disporportionate number in Hollywood - don't know the difference between style and decadence.
I didn't review or even watch John Wick in 2014, when it was released. It looked like just another action flick to me, not that different from Jack Reacher or Taken, other movies I didn't watch. But I kept hearing about it, and hearing about it, and when the sequel (or second chapter, or whatever) was released and the word was that it also was good, I thought I'd better check them both out.
Quick review of the first goes like this: despite an old and tired plot (irresponsible son of a gangster pisses off the wrong guy, and his powerful father must try, unsuccessfully, to keep him alive) John Wick is an enjoyable movie because it has style. He has a cool car. He doesn't talk much. The action scenes are brutal, efficient, and very well-choregraphed; director Chad Stahelski is a veteran stunt man. Throw in just a hint of world-building, and it's makes it an entertaining film.
Everything that is right about John Wick is gone from John Wick: Chapter 2. To begin with, the car is gone. Why is the car gone? At the end of the first movie, John Leguizamo is fixing it up, so we are set up to see it again. It's a great car. It never appears in Chapter 2.
And Stahelski has decided to move the action from the gritty back streets of New York to Rome. Why? Because Rome is more decadent. You can have shootouts in catacombs with security guards wearing Armani suits. At one point, a woman walks backstage from an opulent party/concert in a huge venue and decides to take a bath in a giant stone bathtub/fountain. Who takes a bath at a concert? Characters in ridiculous action flicks, that's who.
Another characteristic of bad action flicks is something I'm from now on calling gun porn. It's that scene where the hero goes to some kind of gun dealer (in James Bond it's Q,) who describes in unnecessary detail every element of every gun he picks up. There's no reason we need to know what material the grip is made of or the barrel velocity or magazine capacity, but they tell us anyway, solely because it makes certain members of the audience drool. John Wick doesn't have this scene (it's far more effective when we see hiim sledgehammer his way through the cement in his basement to uncover his gun stash,) but John Wick Chapter 2 does.
And the world-building here is just completely out of hand. In the first, the idea of The Continental - a secret hotel for hit men and mobsters, where no "business" is allowed on hotel grounds - is intriguing and fun, and low-profile enough to believe that such a place might actually exist in the real world. But Chapter 2 takes us completely out of the real world. In this movie, everyone is somehow involved with the underworld. It's not even the underworld any more, it's just the world. Just about every single person is a secret assassin, from the lady with the stroller, to the homeless guy, to the woman playing violin in the subway.
It's weird to me how much John Wick Chapter 2 is similar to The Matrix Reloaded, and not just because it stars Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne shows up spouting proverbs. Both franchises started out with a stylish movie playing on genre tropes. Both sequels seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the original film work. Style turns into decadence; a bit of world-building to serve the plot turns into a sprawling, over-complicated, and completely ridiculous world. And both have to drag Rome (or in the Matrix' case, Monica Bellucci, who is the very embodiment of Roman decadence) into the mix.
Tasha Robinson, one of my favorite critics, wrote for the Verge that she felt like John Wick Chapte 2 was over the top and ridiculous on purpose, that it was winking at movies of this sort, making fun of them, inviting us to laugh at them. (She apparently got this from the multiple shots of the dog, who doesn't die this time.) I didn't pick up on that; if so, it was subtle, and was the only subtle thing about this film. I think she had a much better time watching John Wick Chapter 2, because she felt invited to laugh with the filmmakers at action tropes. I was laughing at them.
Comments
Post a Comment