This was just a part of the nerdy conversation that took place between my idiot friend and I right before we saw the most anticipated movie of the year. Now I must admit that when I first saw John Wick 1, I wasn’t really all that down with it as it just appeared to be a scrubby version of The Crow without Ernie Hudson and Nine Inch Nails. But I decided to give it another shot a few months later on a flight back from France and everything suddenly clicked for me; what’s not to love about an angry Keanu Reeves unloading clips into the heads of Russian gangsters with whatever random guns he has on his person? That dude really loved his car and his dog!
Well needless to say, I was unbelievably pumped when I saw early video clips of Keanu furiously training with automatic weapons for John Wick 2. He seriously looked like a young Ted Nugent on the night that he realized Donald trump had just won the election. "Finally, my time has come!" (while pumping fists in the air) Unless he was playing Bill from Bill and Ted’s or a confused Neo from The Matrix, Keanu has never been a great actor but with the help of Wick, I believe he’s now finally found his wheelhouse! An angry man of few words who dances while he guns down scrubs with pistols?!? John Wick movies are John Woo’s (Hard Boiled, Face Off) ultimate wet dreams. They have a ton of gun play and pigeons flying around in them; what more can a man ask for?
Wick 2’s plot is slightly more complicated than 1 in that Wick now has to get revenge on the jerk who blew up his house. Yup, a real brain teaser there! Ok, so there’s a bit more to it than that. In order for him to get out of the game the first time around, he made a blood pact with an Italian asshole. And in the hitman underworld, whenever you make a blood pact, you are indebted to that person to do whatever job they require of you to pay off that debt. If you choose not to, then they have every right to kill you. Well realizing that Wick is the only man for the job, the Italian decided not to kill him but instead chose to blow up his house to give him a bit of motivation. Wick reluctantly agrees after this but once he completes the job, he finds out that a bounty is now out for his head.
It is at this point you realize that 50% of New York is apparently made up of assassins with day jobs; Wick finds himself dodging janitors, violin players, and even homeless people as he tries to seek sanctuary with the one man who still owes him a favor, fat Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne). But before we get to this point, Wick goes to Italy to pay off his debt, and this is where you are introduced to a world of tailors who make designer bulletproof suits for cocktail parties, sommeliers whose specialties are guns, and Emo Evanescence bands with dj’s.
And if that wasn’t enough, Hollywood finally gave me a bit of a reprieve with Ruby Randy Rose. She tried to ruin my action month with her awful performances in XXX 3 and Resident Evil but thankfully here, they make her a mute. I get that most of America finds her hot but she just looks like a shapeless scrub with a Macaulay Culkin haircut to me. She was ok as a villain in this film but Common, who has the coolest type cast ever as a hitman, is probably the best adversary Wick faces as they have multiple shootout/fight scenes that are pretty badass. The coolest part of the film goes to its climatic scene where director and former stuntman Chad Stahlelski pays tribute to Enter the Dragon and that one James Bond film where he perfectly blends art, film, and music when Wick takes out a bunch of Julian Edelman lookalikes in New York’s Met Museum. This scene, along with the multiple head shots and the gothic death scene of a head assassin in Italy will definitely stay with me for a long time.
To put it simply, this movie was grade A badass and gets a rating of TIGHT from me.
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