The reader reaction to my review of John Wick was overwhelmingly positive.
In fact, there were immediate calls for me to review the sequel.
But enthusiasm got the better of my mutuals over the weekend, so they posted their own takes on John Wick: Chapter 2.
And you know what? They ended up saying pretty much everything I’d planned to say in my review.
Do I have the smartest readers, or what?
Being the high-efficiency content recycling machine I am, I’m just gonna let them review John Wick 2 for me …
Yep, the film makers created what they thought was a one-off passion project, not expecting a sequel.
Then they got caught flat-footed when their work of love became a surprise hit, and they had to do a follow up.
What they came up with was good enough, it seems.
They solved the problem of how to rope John back into the underworld pretty elegantly.
And we got some gorgeous actions set pieces.
But then the resolution kind of drops the ball.
Which is a besetting vice of this franchise.
If you want to dive deeper, friend of the blog D.J. Schreffler did a whole, thought-provoking thread:
And that’s an excellent note to bring the curtain down on.
Until we get to John Wick 3 …
The action of MS Gundam meets the spy thrills of Tom Clancy
Maybe I’m a bit of a prude, but I found the sequel too salacious if that is the correct word.
If they never made a third movie the second one would still have a perfect ending. The entire story is about a detached killer finding something higher than himself and committing to it, even when the world conspires to take him down. The final confrontation where he has to throw everything away to do the right thing and ends up hated by the world is a great finale. A third movie to wrap it up would have been fine, but that as an ending works great.
The sequel did what it was supposed to: more of the same, more tension, more expansion, but enough mystery to maintain the mystique. There isn’t any other way to do a JW sequel than the way they made it here. This is why it was so well received. It did the job people wanted from it.
I still think everyone would have forgiven all the the flaws in these movies had JW3 had an actual ending.
JW3 failing to forward the plot implied by the ending of JW2 is an example of what I call sequelitis.
In a nutshell, an IP suffers from sequelitis when there is a sequel–which is supposed to further the story and plot from before–that instead does something completely different, and fails to meaningfully advance things at all.
If 3 had substantially gotten towards the overthrow of the Table, it could still have had a To Be Continued… ending, but it would have been proper, and much (if not all) forgiven it.
So that twitter thread was live-tweeting knee-jerk reactions when I was watching JW2 for the first time at home.
I thought the resolution was a wonderful transition to John Wick Overthrows the Table.
Alas, that is not what we got at all.
John C. Wright writes about stories that make promises, and then break them. And how readers or viewers, the ones receiving the story, are betrayed by these broken promises.
Much of Hollywood, and some authors, need someone going over the plotlines to see where promises made to the recipient are broken. And there are enough fanboys that Hollywood in particular could get volunteers to do it. But they do not serve Art or the muses who so inspire…
Implied promises that stories make to their readers are easy for writers to overlook because they’re so close to the material.
The unfulfilled promise is one of the top things I look for when editing author clients’ books.
The fourth movie will reveal that it was all a dream Wick had while he was getting beat up by the Russians from the first movie