By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Chad Stahelski
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, John Leguizamo, Bridget Moynahan, Claudia Gerini, Common, Ruby Rose, Franco Nero, Peter Stormare and Laurence Fishburne.
Rating: Very Good.
Keanu Reeves is back as the hitman John Wick in “John Wick: Chapter 2” and the results again were really good.
After finishing his vengeance against crime lords Viggo Tarasov and his son Iosef for stealing his car and killing his dog, John Wick decides to go for retirement again.
One day he receives the visit of Santino D´Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) who asks for an assignment on killing his sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini) so Santino can have a bigger seat in the world of crime.
John declines the assignment which makes Santino furious and destroys John´s house. Now John will have no choice to accept the mission.
While he is in the mission, Santino decide to put a bounty for John´s life and he will be in the search of all the assassins of the world including Cassian (Common).
Now John will have a race against time to complete the mission, survive and confront Santino before it´s too late.
One of the things that I liked of this sequel of John Wick is the filmmaking itself. The story is very good but compared to the first one it´s a little bit weak.
The direction by Chad Stahelski, who directed the first “John Wick” lead to awesome action sequences that were really made and choreographed and made Keanu Reeves a badass for this role.
Other element that I loved in the story was the inner conflict that John Wick faces in the entire film and all the progressive complications he has to go in order to achieve his goal.
Also in this part we see that he is forced to go back to crime after he completed his goal in the first film. This is one of the elements that makes even more interesting.
Some of the fighting and sequences are over the top and a little bit ridiculous but still the movie complies and keeps the purpose of being entertaining.
I do think that Chad Stahelski revived the action genre with “John Wick” since we have only seen explosions all over the place and no story. Here it has story and the scene where both Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne are together is very well written and I felt that it was kind of a homage to “The Matrix” trilogy which became very successful.
I can´t wait for John Wick 3 which is currently in talks and I give a high recommendation for this second part but it´s important to see the first film in order to understand this one.