Stahelski is a former stunt double, and he choreographs the action in breathtaking long takes, as if to create a Rite of Spring for gore-hounds, each kill more convulsive than the last, each attacker a nastier gag sprung by sonofabitch gods. The body count of John Wick: Chapter 2 is stratospheric, but the assailants aren’t weightless and interchangeable, as in a video game.
The ancient Catacombs are a mythic setting for a battle between a demigod and a wave of phantoms - near-anonymous figures that rush from the blue mist and are promptly sent back into it, pinwheeling gore. What follows has little logic and less credibility, but that’s a minor quibble. In the hotel’s Rome branch (run by Franco Nero as “Julius”), Wick acquires his elegant bulletproof wardrobe and yummy array of weapons, the latter from the great Peter Serafinowicz as “the Sommelier.” Then he heads for Rome to meet his prey - and his destiny. Wick” with what seems like a glimmer of actual affection - a passing nod from one River Styx pure soul to another. (He calls John “Jonathan,” which threw me since the diminutive of Jonathan is “Jon.” Perhaps John Wick was originally Jonathan Wickstein.) Lance Reddick with an Afro-Caribbean accent plays the elaborately formal desk clerk, Charon, who welcomes “Mr. It’s presided over by a charmingly fatalistic Ian McShane as Winston, a man who has seen and done many brutal things but whose sense of decorum is matchless. The movie instantly improves when Wick strides into the tony Continental Hotel, which caters to the most violent people on Earth but where violence is verboten. Keanu is most excellent when he’s righteous. To accept would likely mean death, too, but Wick would at least have righteousness on his side. (Santino’s mob-boss sister, not John’s: John doesn’t appear to have any family except his new dog and his wife in flashbacks.) Wick abhors the task, but to refuse would mean death.
(Wick is daring the gods by moving into a place with so many floor-to-ceiling windows: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t fire CA-415 assault rifles.) He wants John to murder his mob-boss sister. As the movie proper begins, Santino shows up at John’s secluded modernist house in the New York suburbs. To resign from a club that does not let its members go lightly, Wick apparently gave his “marker” (a fancy coin) to a sleek Italian hood named Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio). John Wick: Chapter 2 is built on something comparatively complicated. Action-movie premises don’t come much more elemental. Wick is relit after a psychotic bully - the son of a Slavic kingpin - steals his vintage automobile and kills the puppy that had been his wife’s last (posthumous) gift. It began, you’ll recall, with the eponymous ex-super-assassin (Keanu Reeves) mourning his wife, who has just died from natural causes. The first John Wick had its champions (I wasn’t among them), but next to its sequel it seems cartoonishly thin.
The carnage is abstract, ritualized, like something out of Kabuki theater, where even the most senseless brutality has firm rules of order. It’s both crazy-violent and funereal, too grim for guiltless kicks, but in its way, quite beautiful. After a campy opening action sequence that must have been ordered up by a studio boob looking for something more “lite,” Chad Stahelski’s shoot-’em-up, hack-’em-up John Wick: Chapter 2 settles into one of the bleakest bloodbaths you’ll see outside an actual war movie.
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