The virtues here remain the same, only more so. The locations (mostly neon-tinged, mostly at night) are impressive and well used; the escalation from the first film's fancy but plausible homes and abandoned warehouses to cavernous eurotrash nightclubs and Parisian landmarks has been well orchestrated. In the cast old favourites (Ian McShane, Lawrence Fishburne) provide old pleasures, while the newcomers - most notably Bill Skarsgard as new representative of the High Table / chief baddie Marchese Vincent de Gramont and the amoral tracker "Mr Nobody" (Shamier Anderson) - fulfill their roles with aplomb.
Previous installments have been happy to gesture towards the spaghetti western (most notably in the previous film where Wick puts together a revolver out of various substandard guns a la a similar scene in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) but this fully embraces the genre. Enter Caine (Donnie Yen), a blind killer and old friend of Wick's who is forced to once again pick up the gun (if he doesn't, the High Table will kill his violin playing daughter) and could possibly be the only gunslinger who can take our hero down.
In earlier films care was taken to give Wick a savage beating or bad wound early on to explain why the world's deadliest killer had to work hard to take out dozens of disposable chumps (in the real world, being played by a man in his mid-50s was explanation enough, especially as Reeves is clearly doing many of his own moves and stunts). But here the film begins with Wick fully rested and recovered; his weariness now comes from someplace deeper, a realisation that maybe the blood on his hands won't wash off.
What makes the best spaghetti westerns work - and this is the best spaghetti western in a long time - is their willingness to go too far, to be epic in the service of material that lesser films would discard in a line or a scene. This film is intentionally too much of a good thing, everything dialed up to eleven in a way that reflects Wick's own exhaustion even as he beats down a dozen goons using nunchucks. You're meant to feel like this could have been a smaller film: the excess is the point.
(why else have a radio DJ providing a soundtrack and running commentary for Paris' hitman community as they try to take Wick down? It might seem like a reference to Vanishing Point's similar in-movie DJ Super Soul or the radio updates in The Warriors, but I like to think this version's choice of 'Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide' comes direct from NWA's '100 Miles and Runnin')
Towards the end there's a visual joke about how Wick just won't stop even when all his progress is taken from him. It's a great joke: it's also a joke the series could only make with the end in sight. There's plenty of humour in the John Wick films if you know where to look (and you don't always have to look hard, as with Scott Adkins' Killa, a chunky bad guy who's yet another stand out in a film packed with them). But the films only work because they take Wick and his struggles seriously.
Reeve's performance is largely restricted to intensely impressive physical action and the occasional grimly determined line reading, but there's one moment - also, not coincidentally, towards the end - where he briefly shows another side to the remorseless killing machine with a body count in the high triple figures. Reeves sells it perfectly; Hollywood's best action franchise this century is complete.
- Anthony Morris
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