A complete lack of effort from Keanu and everyone involved

Rating: 4/10 (16 July 2017)

I'd love to feed you one of those tired clichés along the lines of, "if you liked John Wick, you'll love John Wick 2!" or "even better than the first!" But those would be dirty, rotten lies.
The truth is that John Wick 2 falls far short of the first, which I consider a fun, albeit mostly mindless, action romp. I can sum up John Wick 1 in 11 words: A retired hit-man unleashes vengeance on those who killed his dog. It's simple, which is fine. Its quality doesn't come from its premise; it comes from cool sequences of Keanu Reeves shooting and kicking and punching people.
John Wick 2 makes zero effort to create anything unique from the original. The story is the exact same except this time John Wick is seeking vengeance on someone who blew up his house. I think. There seemed to be some other motivation for John Wick, which involved a guy asking him to kill someone, John Wick refusing, the guy blowing up his house with a bazooka, then John Wick trying to kill that guy and also kill a lot of other guys.
It didn't make any sense to me that John Wick refused to kill one single person, but willingly killed dozens of others a short time later. However, it did make sense me that John Wick wanted to kill someone who just blew up his house with a bazooka because if a guy blew up my house with a bazooka, I would probably want to kill him too. So, I chose to accept that as his motivation.
You might be thinking, "well what made you dislike John Wick 2 so much if you liked John Wick 1? They sound eerily similar." Rest easy, voice that asks me questions in the form of a convenient segue. I'm about to cover that.
I put a huge heaping pile of blame on Keanu for this one. His lifelessness exceeded even his own personal record for lifelessness in this performance. His lifelessness baffled scientists by reaching levels of lifelessness previously believed to be only reachable by those who are actually without life.
Keanu delivered each line with the enthusiasm of moody teenager talking to his parents about math class. Not only did he seem disinterested in what he said, he also sounded a little angry and confused every time he spoke. I'm not sure if that was an ill-conceived character choice or just terrible acting. Either way, his speaking moments made me cringe.
Since I'm piling on, I'll mention Keanu's walk. I'm not sure if that's how he thinks a badass walks, or if he thinks that's how a beat up person walks, or if that's just Keanu's normal walking style, but I found it distracting. No one walks like that. Except for possibly Keanu if that is indeed his normal walking style. The incompetent aspects of the movie that I wouldn't blame on Keanu all come down to the ineptitude of his enemies. I'm not a hit-man, nor a gun expert, nor have I received anything resembling training in combat. I haven't even played Halo or Call of Duty. But even I know about the thing where you lean close to the wall then peak around the corner before sprinting out in the open. John Wick probably amassed 15 easy kills simply due to his enemies never once checking corners properly.
If John Wick's enemies' only shortcomings were their corner checking failures, they may have been palatable. Unfortunately, they also had the worst aim in the history of terrible aim bad guys in movies. John Wick must have landed 30 headshots, yet the other guys landed zero. They also committed unconscionably stupid errors, such as attempting to kill John Wick with their fists rather than shooting him. They also hit him with their car then stepped out of the car to fight him rather than hitting him with their car again. By the way, John Wick shot all those guys.
The one part of the movie that I enjoyed came when John Wick shot guys in that cool mirrored set of rooms. Kudos to whoever designed that place and whoever staged the scenes in there. The mesmerizing optics in that sequence made me forget all my other gripes with the movie for a while.
I will hold out hope that John Wick 3 manages to instill that level of creativity and visual brilliance with greater frequency. If not, I'll be right back here, writing another scathing review for an action movie beloved by many.