Every now and then a movie comes out of nowhere to surprise you. It’s usually a small-scale piece of genre work whose own producers are likely so relieved just to have it done and get it released that they don’t really know they might have something special on their hands. Last year’s big surprise was Hell or High Water, a bank-robber film about which nobody knew anything until it suddenly appeared—and you knew from the first moment you saw a getaway car making its way through the back alleys of a dusty West Texas town that you were seeing something fresh and unexpected. It’s a Best Picture nominee—the least likely Best Picture nominee in many years.
The 2015 surprise was The Gift, the writing and directing debut of the actor Joel Edgerton—a three-character suspense thriller so perfectly calibrated that it scared you and unnerved you like clockwork until a final twist that you didn’t know was even necessary left you stunned in your seat.
And in 2014, there was John Wick, with Keanu Reeves as a retired hit man mourning the loss of the wife for whom he went straight. To call the movie hardboiled would be an understatement; more people die in John Wick than in many small wars, and all because a stupid Russian gangster kills the title character’s dog. The shooting and fighting scenes are startlingly interesting because the directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch chose to film them in long unbroken takes rather than chop them up into thousands of shots the way most modern action movies do it. They are like Busby Berkeley ultraviolence. And to top it off, screenwriter Derek Kolstad invented an amusingly detailed secret criminal world parallel to our own, in which bad guys are members of private clubs and hotels where they can buy their goods with Krugerrands and have some nice downtime socializing with each other.
John Wick is the definition of a guilty pleasure. Now there is John Wick: Chapter 2, and judging from the good box-office numbers, many of the people who were delighted by the discovery of the original John Wick are flocking to the theater to see if they can have the same experience. So did I. Alas, as the Ghost of Daffy Duck said on the vaudeville stage when he finally scored enormous applause by blowing himself up: “I can only do it once.” You can only surprise an audience with an out-of-nowhere sleeper once.
John Wick kills more people in this one, and goes to Rome for about 20 minutes to kill more people, and then returns to New York to evade being killed by a lot of other people. The contrast between the barely breathing Keanu Reeves at rest and the startlingly dynamic Keanu Reeves in motion was thrilling in the first picture but is nothing new now.
The problem, it turns out, is that having seen the first chapter, you know all there is to learn. You already know the sad guy with the dog is the world’s most skilled killer. You already know that he has this trick where he immobilizes another guy’s gun arm, uses it to shoot a second guy, then turns the gun on the guy holding it and kills him, too. You know that the underworld hangs out at a lavish and old-fashioned hotel on Wall Street called the Continental, and that the glorious Ian McShane is its dashing and all-knowing proprietor. You didn’t know that there was a branch of the Continental in Rome, where the 1960s Italian movie icon Franco Nero is the manager, but it’s just more of the same.
The same screenwriter, Derek Krolstad, tries to freshen up the proceedings by adding new elements to the complex criminal “mythology” of the original—for example, that many of New York City’s homeless are actually working for a mastermind who communicates by pigeon. But that’s a little labored.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
