This review of John Wick 2 by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the AV Club has always been my favorite example of what happens when a Liberal Arts education gets away from you:

“The movie’s given shape by the central metaphor of the secret criminal underworld as a mythic land of the dead. The gold bullion that is the currency of choice in the Wick-verse realizes its Plutonic meaning here…. Wick has become an Orpheus figure, with killing as his art.”

Let me just remind you, this is a film about a super-assassin who rolls around the floor shooting people in the face. Is this really the film to mine for Plutonic meaning? Well that is the great thing about art though, isn’t it? We can all have our own opinion about it, and we all get to be right.

I myself enjoyed the first John Wick, not as a piece of art or as a complex metaphor, but because I love a good action flick featuring an unstoppable killer archetype that has beautifully staged action and stunt-work. It was entertaining as hell from start to finish, and the action choreography is second to none. In a way it did elevate the standard genre action flick by simply bringing the execution up to such a high level. But my enjoyment of John Wick pretty much started and stopped at an aesthetic appreciation. I didn’t feel the need to go any deeper. In fact, I don’t even think the film needed a sequel.

Part of the fun of the first John Wick was that you were suddenly in this weird alternate fantasy world where there existed a secret society of assassins, governed by their own rules and rivalries and rituals. And it was a pretty fully-imagined world, so when things happened you knew you were getting a glimpse of something that actually felt real and bigger and deeper. And for me, that was enough - the idea that this world existed and that we got to see a part of it is what made it fun. What I didn’t need is for that world to then be fully spelled out in exquisite detail in subsequent films. To me that actually kind of ruins the illusion. If we just see bits and pieces of this secret underworld, then it has charm, it has allure. Once you start trying to walk me through how it all works, which is what John Wick 2 did, I lose interest. It’s not exciting anymore.

This is a classic American mistake - take the kernel of a good idea and just run it into the fucking ground in order to wring as much money from it as possible. Make the subtext text. Flog it to death with un-ending sequels. The action is still of course top-notch, and the John Wick films are all very well made on a technical level. But I just didn’t need all that background.

I thought the first John Wick benefited from NOT giving you all the background and spelling everything out for you like you were an idiot. And this, I suppose, is why I am not writing high-brow film criticism. Because to me, the world they fleshed out in John Wick 2 was not full of metaphors and Greek mythology. It was a heavy-handed attempt to take a hot property and bog it down with back-story and world-building and detail when, in truth, all we wanted to see was Keanu Reeves spin-kicking a guy in the face while shooting three other guys at the same time.