'John Wick: Chapter 2'

• Starring – Keanu Reeves, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ian McShane, Ruby Rose, Common, Lance Reddick, Laurence Fishburne.
• Director – Chad Stahelski
• Rating – 15 UK
• Length – 2hr 2min

Most men at the age of 53, tend to slow down, instead of doing intense work outs they do slight less, lift slightly lighter weights, run a little less etc. Not if you're Keanu Reeves, at the age of 53, (yes he is that old), is actually doing more work and when preparing for John Wick and its amazing sequel, far more intense physical training. This included what they call close quarter fighting with his hands, knives and guns. For the action fan in me, John Wick was amazing and just when I thought Reeves couldn’t do any more; he released John Wick Chapter 2.

Picking up just after the first movie, we see John trying to get his life back in order, he does this by walking into a garage owned by Abram (Peter Stormare), stealing his car back and kicking off an action scene that most movies would use as its culminating scene, you know the one where the good guy has beaten, shot or killed his way through all the bad guys and he makes it to the bosses hideout for one last show down. Well like the first movie the action sequences get better and better as the movie goes on. On a personal note a standout scene involves a pencil; I’ll not say anymore than that, you will know what I mean when you watch it.

Sometime later John is approached by a man from his past who asks him to do another job, in the end John accepts the job, which is to kill someone on the council of people who governs this world of assassins and organised crime. John does the job, gets double crossed, and a bounty is placed on his head. He then goes on a bloody spree of killing everyone who gets in his way.

Instead of thinking of this as another story with the same characters, its better to think of it as a continuation of the same story, this makes the movie a lot more enjoyable as it just keeps up the great work from the first movie.

Some people have accused Reeves of not being the best actor, well I disagree, I just think he has a particular type of role that he does better than anyone else. His characters tend to not talk a lot, but when they do its worth hearing, and yes I will even count Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan in that, because after I saw Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure, my favourite word was excellent, I drove my parents nuts.

On a more serious note, this movie won’t win any Oscars, but that’s not why we are here, we are here to watch John Wick (The Baba-Yaga) in action and we get that in spades. Director Chad Stahelski is a great action director, he doesn’t use any of this shaky cam nonsense, everything is clean, crisp and in fantastic detail. There is very little editing in the action sequences, instead we are treated to one camera tracking the action. This is evident in a great scene with John and Cassian (Common), they start at the top of a three tiered stair case and they proceed to kick holy hell out of each other whilst throwing each other down the stairs. This stands out because you can clearly see its Reeves and Common doing all their own stunts as well as the fighting, I have a huge amount of respect for actors who try as much as their insurance policy allows, you hear to often about actors who let the stunt man take over for even the easiest of stunt; so when you see Reeves and Common falling down three sets of stone stairs, you gain a bit more respect for them and can only imagine how sore they were after it.

John wick is a great movie, no actually it’s fantastic, it’s a throw back to those early eighties action revenge movies, great action, stunts, cool characters and very little CGI (computer generated images).

Hopefully the third movie comes out soon, but after looking at what Reeves is doing next on IMDB (Internet Movie Database), he is pretty busy; but like the first movie this has done really well in the box office and in Bluray/DVD sales, so hopefully we get an announcement soon.