Action>Story

Rating: 4/10 (16 February 2017)

The first John Wick was a bit of a revolutionary when it came to action films. It brought interesting and dynamic action and did for guns what samurai movies did for swords. The 'gun play' in that movie was never boring.
Now let's talk about John Wick: Chapter 2
I'll start with the good parts of this movie.
A lot of the technical parts of this movie were fantastic. The lighting in each scene brought a stylized look and feel to the movie. The sound design is great, making each punch and gun shot ever the more powerful. The choreography is A+, which is expected from a John Wick film. You can really tell they put a lot of time and effort into making sure every action scene has great choreography.
The acting from Keanu Reeves was pretty good, he has what I call the 'Schwarzenegger effect'. He was able to take cheesy lines, and there were a lot, and deliver them in a not so cheesy way. He was very devoted to making sure every stunt looked good, doing all of his own stunts.
Onto the bad parts.
I'm not quite sure what happened, the first John Wick had a decent story, giving our main character a good motivation throughout and leaving a good payoff for the audience. John Wick: Chapter 2 has none of this.
While I can't give away too much without getting into spoiler territory, I'll say this. John Wick's motivation in this film is very bad. In the first film he had the motivation of, "You killed my dog my late wife gave to me and stole my car". In this film it's less believable and way too convoluted.
John Wick is the only memorable character in this entire film because the film is about him. The villain is the typical villain you'd expect in any action film with his/her typical henchmen. Even the villain's motivation is a bit dodgy. I'm not quite sure why Laurence Fishburne is in this movie, he has two scenes and talks like Negan from The Walking Dead the entire time. He provides no real story other than some background information. The end of this film started an interesting idea within the universe but cut it short for the third movie.
The music in this movie is pretty awful. It's your typical dubstep in each and every action scene, which gets annoying over a long period of time.
Sadly, even the action got boring after about an hour. Every single action scene is, "let me use my fists then go behind a corner, grab a gun, shoot for a bit, reload, shoot for a bit, go behind another corner, grab a bigger gun, shoot for a bit, reload, shoot for a bit, go behind yet another corner and grab a bigger gun, shoot for a bit, reload, and shoot for some more". I just described an entire action scene from this film.
The payoff for this film was so quick and had no impact on the audience. Heck, the scene that had the most impact on the audience was John Wick, two baddies, and a pencil.
Overall, John Wick: Chapter 2 has some great technical things going for it that they improved since the first film. The acting was pretty solid from Reeves but with his character being the only memorable one. The story quality has significantly decreased since the first film with characters motivations being convoluted and, at times, a bit silly. If you're with a couple of friends and you feel like turning off your brain for a while, you'll have fun with John Wick: Chapter 2.