5/16/2023 0 Comments John wick chapter 2 vex moviesWhat matters is the design of the poster: a plume of red billowing out into white. I didn't catch enough of the details to know if any of it's real or not. ![]() I think this is most clear (at any rate, it's where I switched from "is the movie doing this, or am I just reaching?" to "hell yeah, the movie is doing this") late in the film, when the action enters the New York subway system, and there's a poster for some modern art show at some modern art museum. The thing about John Wick: Chapter 2, and it's maybe the strangest facet of a movie that is, when you start to crack it up, strange in almost every possible detail, is that it is obsessed with equating fine art and violence. Okay, it 100% is, but that is absolutely okay: in all my years of loving style-over-substance movies, I've never been more certain that it was okay than I am right now. This may sound like so much stylish fluff and nonsense. It's beautiful, obsessed with surfaces, and drenched in blood, and the results couldn't be more striking: it's like Paolo Sorrentino trying his hand at Grand Guignol, or maybe Mario Bava making a perfume ad. There's a certain kind of glamorousness to it that speaks of haughty '60s Jet Set art cinema - something distinctly Italianate, like all melange of all that country's many great cinematic stylists into one package that for whatever reason decided to contain a floridly choreographed action movie (genuine question: is there even one good Italian action movie? As many wonderful cop thrillers, horror movies, and Westerns as the country has produced over the last half-century, I have to imagine there must be, but I sure can't name it). Or because a lengthy sequence takes place in the prettiest version of Rome to show up in any American-made movie basically in all of the history movies set in Rome. It's continental as all hell, and not only because the Continental is the name of two of the film's most significant plot points. Chapter 2 keeps the glossiness, and replaces Hong Kong with. John Wick is a fairly transparent attempt to do a '90s Hong Kong action movie in 2010s America, frequently with glosses of cool digital cinematography. So is the first one, of course, but it's all in the style being evoked. Quantity, not quality, you understand.Ĭhapter 2 is a hell of a stylish movie. The flipside is that the bath house scene is conspicuously the best part of John Wick, with absolutely nothing around it that can compete, while just about the entirety of Chapter 2 is operating at a level just a shade below that. There's not one single, solitary action setpiece in Chapter 2 that I disliked - there's not really one setpiece that I'm terribly inclined to find even minor fault with - but there's also nothing here that matches the heights of the icy-blue bath house scene in the first film. This will be, I am sure, not necessarily the majority opinion, because in at least one hugely respect, the first film is still on top: it's a decisively better action movie, with more elegantly fluid gun-fu choreography. ![]() So anyway, John Wick: Chapter 2 is better than John Wick. Fairy tale, cloud cuckoo land idiot optimistic case scenario was that John Wick: Chapter 2 would in fact be better than John Wick. Best case scenario, I figured, was that John Wick: Chapter 2, would be in pretty much every way just as good as 2014's John Wick - the best American action movie of the last decade and a half or more * - only without the jolt of novelty & thus not as enjoyable.
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