John Wick Chapter 2 (0/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 2 hours

Not for children.

This is definitely a candidate for the list of the 10 worst films ever made. It’s just 2 hours of John Wick (Keanu Reeves) killing people, shooting them in the head at point blank range in graphic shots, and then re-shooting them just to make sure, over and over and over and over. The movie is simply a set piece of the same scene for two long hours. The story, if you will excuse the expression, is that John is presented with a marker that he has to fulfill, to kill the sister of the holder of the marker so he can take her place on the board of their criminal enterprise.

So John feels he has no choice. Along the way a contract is put on John and it appears that everyone in the world is in the assassination business because the hit is texted throughout the planet, and just about everybody in the world receives it and puts John on their hit list. Needless to say, John is nothing if not an efficient killer, so he kills them all.

A reprehensible homage to mindless cold-blooded murder, it can stand as an epitome of movies that glorify violence. Exposure to such pervasive violence and its glorification can make aggressive people in the audience immune to normal feelings about violent acts so that, given the chance, they may emulate that to which they have been exposed. In an August 23, 2013 New York Times Op Ed piece, forensic psychiatrists Vasilis K. Pozios, Praveen R. Kambam, and H. Eric Bender stated,

“There is now consensus that exposure to media violence is linked to actual violent behavior — a link found by many scholars to be on par with the correlation of exposure to secondhand smoke and the risk of lung cancer. In a meta-analysis of 217 studies published between 1957 and 1990, the psychologists George Comstock and Haejung Paik found that the short-term effect of exposure to media violence on actual physical violence against a person was moderate to large in strength.”

It’s disgraceful that Hollywood keeps foisting movies like this that have no other purpose than to desensitize people to bestial brutality. There is little in this film apart from Reeves shooting one person after another in the head and then following up with another, shown graphically, along with some of the most absurd fight scenes ever filmed. This is a reprehensible movie and everyone associated with it should be ashamed of themselves, regardless of what might be a huge box office. But I guess I'm whistling Dixie when I hope for integrity in Hollywood.

I wasted two entire hours sitting through it, two hours I will never get back. But it would be worth it if it kept others from so wasting their time.

The film ends with what is a disappointingly obvious promise of a third iteration of this rubbish. What’s really disillusioning is that as I write this Rottentomatoes.com has published 88 reviews with 79 positive for a rating of 91% for this despicable piece of trash. What is this world coming to? When I post my review, I guess the rating might go down to 90%.