John Wick: Chapter Two
This blog has been far, far too positive. Of the seven things I’ve written about thus far, only one of them had any significant problems (from my perspective at least). It’s time to introduce, on this blog, an advanced technique of literary criticism known as “ruthless nitpicking,” a true quantum leap[1] in my ability to complain about things on the Internet. By this time next year, God willing, I expect to have escalated all the way into “fanboyish whining.”
Part of the underlying logic of this post is going to be this two-part piece by Shamus Young, my (not-so) secret nerd crush. To abbreviate his article, there’s a phenomenon he terms “story collapse,” wherein a plot hole triggers scrutiny, which uncovers more flaws, which triggers more scrutiny, and so forth. But (importantly), this can’t happen until you’ve lost trust in the storyteller. A brief continuity error, an error in plotting, an unmotivated action, all these things can be excused. But if you no longer trust the author to give you a coherent narrative, any one of those can trigger story collapse and bring the house of cards on which any piece of narrative media is built tumbling down. Narrative trust is a resource like any other, and an author can exhaust it. If you’re capable of noticing a fiddly continuity error, the problem isn’t at that point in the work, the problem was when you lost your emotional engagement. Now, based on the generally positive response I’ve seen across the internet, I suspect this wasn’t a problem for most viewers of John Wick: Chapter 2. But, I was in full on story collapse by the midpoint of the film. Looking back on my experience of the film, I found flaws with the characters and worldbuilding right from the beginning, flaws that really start with motivation, flaws that left the story teetering over the edge.
Disclaimer the first: Standard issue SPOILER WARNING. I’ll be talking about why this movie really failed to hit the mark with me, which requires that I dig into the narrative a fair bit.
Disclaimer the second: I’ve only seen this movie once, when usually these posts are based on repeated readings/viewings/playthroughs, so I may make mistakes or have missed things of significance. If there are any such errors/omissions below, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Disclaimer the third: My feelings about this movie are thoroughly tainted by comparison to its predecessor. It’s probably a good movie in it’s own right, but I can’t really judge that independently.
Before getting down into the real meat of this, I really appreciated the two other assassins who John comes into conflict with over the course of the film, Ares[2] and Cassian. Ares was a fun character, with a lot of personality. I felt the film could’ve given us far less emphasis on her until she and John actually started fighting; the amount of camera attention given to her before the first fight scene between them made that *ahem* “betrayal” feel even less surprising. Given that it’s fairly clear right from the beginning John is likely to go after Santino as soon as Gianna is dead, her presence in Rome is utterly unsurprising, and they needn’t have wasted shots establishing her more than once. Apart from that, Ruby Rose did a terrific job portraying a female assassin of a far less stereotypical bent than Perkins from the last movie, an adrenaline junkie cocksure and arrogant about her own abilities . Cassian was also memorable, seeming like he could’ve been the protagonist of a different movie. The moment when he bumps into John as he leaves Gianna’s chambers and subsequent standoff between them was one of the moments in the movie where the tension ramped highest. Anyway, enough positivity, you’re here for the complaining!
The opening sequence centers around John as he infiltrates the complex of Abram Tarasov and takes his car back. It’s a mistake in the film’s pacing to put this here. In John Wick, it’s nearly a half hour from the opening of the movie to the first action sequence. The movie spends that time establishing character, building tension, and making us care about the action sequences when they do come. The hot open, as presented, is noticeably inferior on every one of these premises. We know who John is, but that was in a movie three years ago. We have no idea who Abram is or why we should care, other than as a connection to the villains of the last movie, and his henchmen are even more meaningless. Character is what makes an action scene, and you simply cannot rely on the audience carrying over our attachment from a movie released three years before. Any tension built in this scene is immediately defused, as it’s entirely disconnected from the central narrative. I’m not saying it’s impossible for a hot open to a sequel to work. Captain America: The Winter Soldier gives us an opening based around infiltration, with quiet, quick takedowns and a rapid cycle of tension and release that builds attachment by putting the protagonist in danger, then withdrawing the threat before we can get bored. A protracted sequence of lengthy fistfights and car chases with repeated setbacks, before even the title card? There isn’t an opportunity there for the author to build our emotional bond with the character or grow our trust in the authenticity of the narrative.
We also begin to see the problems with character motivation that absolutely plague this movie. Abram knows who the car belongs to, knows John is on his way to get it, and wants revenge on the man who killed his brother and nephew. Why on Earth has he not wired a brick of C4 to the ignition? At least cut the brake wires? Punctured a single freaking tire? John makes no attempt whatsoever to check for any of these things before he merrily starts ‘er up. We then see John attempt to just drive away with the car, unsuccessfully, engage in a fight against the Tarasov henchmen in cars and on foot, then go to Abram’s office to offer peace. So did John intend to ask for peace between them from the beginning of this scene? In which case, why did he try to drive away with his car? Did he only think of doing this after beating up/running over more Tarasov henchmen, and if so why did he only decide to do this now? Did he hurt his knuckles beating the eightieth mafia thug into the concrete and decide he’d now had enough? By the end of the movie, we’re watching Santino taunt John into murdering him, when Santino has no real reason to do so. The point here isn’t that these questions don’t have answers (it’s possible they do) or that these flaws make the movie irredeemable on their own (they don’t), it’s that by raising these questions the storytellers have now placed cracks in my ability to believe in the world.
The number of callbacks to the first movie also contributes to shattering the illusion and exposing the ugly moving parts below. We have Abram directly quoting Viggo’s speech, another shootout in a crowd of people dancing to music, John killing three men at a bar with a pencil, Ares’ final words being identical to Viggo’s, and on and on and on. While a few of these are well executed and subtle enough to highlight the connections to the first movie without bringing the artifice of the whole thing to the forefront of one’s mind (Winston meets John at the same fountain in Central Park where Perkins was executed), in total they’re only a distraction and a reminder that we are watching a movie.
The worldbuilding in this film… well, it’s bigger. That isn’t always a problem, but choosing to expand a setting always runs the risk that you’ll lose what made that setting interesting. Moving the action to Rome could’ve raised the stakes by separating John from the support network he knows. Instead, it seems everyone in Rome knows John just as well as everyone in New York. The geographical translation is thus meaningless as far as having any impact upon the character. But as a consequence, we lose the tightly knit, almost intimate feel of the first film.The attachments John had with Marcus, Addy[3], Winston, Charlie, and Charon[4] are what threatened to drag John back under in the first film. Having John know everyone in the entire criminal underworld doesn’t add anything that matters, and only distracts from the relationships that do.
This problem of scale manifests in other ways. John is attacked by half a dozen assassins who seem to be just waiting around, waiting for a target to walk by. John and Cassian have a shootout in the Lincoln Center, before moving into a train station. Winston fills an entire section of Central Park with his people. New York evidently not only has no police, the population is now equal parts assassins, support network, and bystanders. This is no longer a shadow reality, this is just *reality*. The dichotomy of real city and shadow city in the first film is a reflection of John’s dual nature. In this film, it’s more simple; everyone is a killer.
This extends to our protagonist as much as to the city. John is a killer who wishes to no longer be one. That’s what the movie should, fundamentally, be centered on. But we only see this in two scenes: when he refuses to honor his Marker to Santino (after once more burying his past), and when he screams after opening the safe deposit box of guns and coins. For the rest of the movie he’s a consummate professional, entirely unconcerned about murdering everyone who stands in his way. He stabs Cassian but doesn’t finish him as “a professional courtesy,” rather than because he doesn’t want to kill more people. He’s once more given an assignment to kill someone, but is absolved of making any kind of decision by Gianna’s suicide. As our protagonist stands by gormlessly, a character we’ve met ten minutes prior “goes out on her own terms.” We’re not shown this conflict, we’re told. We aren’t even told by the main character, we’re told by Winston while he stands in front of various “symbolic” statues. The final scene is not a resolution to the central conflict, a man coming to peace with the fact that he is a killer, and always will be one; it’s a promise that we will see a sequel wherein John Wick will fight more people. The scene in the first movie wherein John is captured, and disarmed, left alone with his grief and rage, no longer able to express himself through exclusively through unrestrained violence? We don’t get that in this sequel. There’s never a single moment of true vulnerability, never a moment when we can see past the facade.
This sounds harsh[5], but I’m not convinced that this film tells a story. Those have arcs, characters, symbolism, and a function towards which form is directed. This has setpieces, choreography, heavy-handed religious imagery, and form seen as an end in and of itself.