2017 - JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2, see John Wick

John Wick is back shooting a lot of people again in this sequel to John Wick.  It seems that John is indebted to some Italian bad guy who wants his sister killed so he can take over her crime business in Rome.  To persuade John to take the hit he blows up John's house.  So off John goes to Rome to shoot a lot of people before returning to New York to shoot more people.  It seems that the populations of Rome and New York are about 50% assassins as John blasts his way through about every other person he meets.  

Keenau Reeves must have spent a lot of time playing with guns as he practically caresses some of them.   There is no mention of a female love interest in this film as well as the first one.  The real sex scenes are the bullets that come blasting out of John's guns into every hit man and assassin he meets up with.  It's very Freudian.

This is basically an action movie with a somewhat sick sense of humor.  The whole idea that there is a secret society of assassins operating in broad daylight in major cities with a code of assassin ethics is actually pretty funny.  The long uncut scenes of John Wick running around the streets of Rome and New York City just constantly shooting people has a sort of twisted black humor all it's own.

I actually preferred this John Wick film over the first one.  I don't believe for a second the filmmakers took this secret society of assassins seriously for a moment and the constant violence became absurdly funny after a while.

122 minutes, written by Derek Kolstad.

2014 - JOHN WICK, first in a series apparently

After John Wick's car is stolen and dog murdered by Russian gangsters who apparently can run amok in the United States.  Wick seeks revenge which means he shoots lots of people.

This film strikes me as a fairly mediocre action film that somehow did OK at the box office and got decent reviews, go figure.

Apparently no one remembers John Woo's classic Hong Kong films The Killer and Hard Boiled because John Wick is basically those films.  I can assure you the director of John Wick remembers those films because he definitely stages a lot of the shoot em up scenes in the style of those Woo films.



For all the beatings and blood spilling the film is curiously uninvolving.  It's hard to care about these nonexistent characters.

101 minutes.