John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)
Directed by Chad Stahelski
John Wick is forced out of retirement by a former associate looking to seize control of a shadowy international assassins’ guild. Bound by a blood oath to aid him, Wick travels to Rome and does battle against some of the world’s most dangerous killers.
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36 films that influenced John Wick: Chapter 2
What critics say influenced John Wick: Chapter 2
Director Stahelski pays fitting tribute to Bruce Lee and “Enter the Dragon” in one fight sequence.
In one well-executed scene, Wick navigates a hall of mirrors reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s final battle in “Enter the Dragon.”
Whether he’s driving a classic 1969 Mustang into the ground or moving stealthily through an “Enter the Dragon”-esque maze of mirrors, Reeves is, like the movie around him, a stunning object of contemplation.
Stahelski and his stunt team don’t hold back either, delivering one great set piece after the other with ultra-slick precision, whether it’s Wick going toe-to-toe with a fellow assassin in Rome or shooting his way through a gang of hired thugs in the “Enter the Dragon”-inspired climax.
Every set, every shot, has been carefully constructed and artfully illuminated as if fight-choreographer-turned-director Chad Stahelski had placed "Lethal Weapon," "Enter the Dragon," "Hardboiled" and the 1960s British TV series "The Prisoner" into a cinematic blender and concocted a motion picture of such visual mastery, every frame could be a postcard photograph.
There’s also a disorienting callback to the Room of Mirrors finalé from Enter the Dragon, which modernizes the locale to a trendy New York art museum.
John Wick: Chapter 2 also has a very good humor about itself, with details such as the hotel’s sommelier really being a gun dealer, showing the inner workings of the international phone and banking network that gets set in play as soon as a contract is taken out on a life, words and phrases suddenly flashed on the screen, and a wild sequence set at an art exhibition that becomes an obvious tribute to Orson Welles’ hall of mirrors in The Lady From Shanghai.
He and screenwriter Derek Kolstad, who were behind the first film, crib from sources as diverse as Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai and video games, but they consistently find entertainingly unlikely ways for their title character to survive or vanquish his foes.
Their final battle amid a museum installation of mirrors plays like a gonzo and grisly twist of the classic climax of the 1941 noir, “The Lady From Shanghai.”
Wick has to run a gauntlet of them—including Cassian—before tracking down Santino to an art gallery where, amid hundreds of mirrors, windows and multi-colored strobe lights (which, despite all the flamboyance, still can’t hold a candle to the closing sequence from “The Lady from Shanghai”), he must annihilate yet another small army of opponents with guns and martial-arts moves, including D’Antonio’s chief enforcer, a mute named Ares (Ruby Rose), who is presented as something special but proves, in the final analysis, to be both inept and totally incapable of matching John blow for blow.
Or that a long set piece in an art museum is based on the mirror-maze shoot-out in Orson Welles’s “The Lady From Shanghai”?
The movie’s brilliant climax, set in a labyrinthine hall of mirrors in blatant tribute to Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai,” proves the extent to which the filmmakers know their stuff.
Wick is a more ultra-violent, comic book-y variation on Alain Delon’s disciplined hood from Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 classic Le Samouraï, or Chow Yun-fat’s hitman from John Woo’s 1989 gem The Killer—all of them dapper criminals whose lives are defined by their quasi-spiritual adherence to ritual.
In the pantheon of distressed male beauty, “John Wick: Chapter 2” also evokes Walter Hill’s “The Driver” (1978), patterned from Jean-Pierre Melville’s Alain Delon-starring picture of a driven loner, the exquisitely melancholy “Le samourai” (1967).
The few scenes with subtitles are easy to read with large, colored fonts reminiscent of the lively subtitles in Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch.
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The one-on-one battles with Common are spectacular, however, doing for MMA-inspired movie fights what They Live did for pro-wrestling-inspired fights.
The stylized rush is years beyond the clunky if adrenalized pile-on of H.J. Halicki’s junkyard opus, the original “Gone in 60 Seconds” (1974).
In the pantheon of distressed male beauty, “John Wick: Chapter 2” also evokes Walter Hill’s “The Driver” (1978), patterned from Jean-Pierre Melville’s Alain Delon-starring picture of a driven loner, the exquisitely melancholy “Le samourai” (1967).
If John Wick is director Chad Stahelski’s A Better Tomorrow , then its sequel is naturally A Better Tomorrow 2 , a less surprising but crazily amplified tour through the slaughterhouse.
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That distinction may belong to Hal Needham, the guy who went from stunt-doubling for Burt Reynolds to directing him in ‘70s films such as Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run .
Tight-lipped, operating on instinct, remorselessly brutal and efficient, he is the kind of stylish, cold-blooded assassin that John Woo and Chow Yun Fat immortalized in The Killer.
Wick is a more ultra-violent, comic book-y variation on Alain Delon’s disciplined hood from Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 classic Le Samouraï, or Chow Yun-fat’s hitman from John Woo’s 1989 gem The Killer—all of them dapper criminals whose lives are defined by their quasi-spiritual adherence to ritual.