KEANU REEVES HITS US IN THE FACE WITH A FEW JOHN WICK 2 PLOT POINTS
JOHN WICK really seemed to sneak up on a lot of people when it was released. A good amount of people chalked it up to your typical Keanu Reeves affair until they actually checked it out and were kicked right in the balls by an awesome action flick that did so much that very few American movies within the genre do anymore. We got sequences that we could actually see, filled with long shots of action, that only heightened the rush of seeing it all unfold, something you don’t typically get when you have to try to decipher 420 cuts in a span of 8 seconds. We also got simple and identifiable stakes we could attach ourselves to emotionally rather than Keanu Reeves having to save the world from the latest global threat. JOHN WICK was a simple and effective action movie, and with news of a sequel coming in the wake of its success, there have been a lot of questions about how you catch that lightning in a bottle again.
Speaking to Collider, Reeves laid out some basic plot points about what story JOHN WICK 2 is going to try to tell, and, while it sounds like a premise we’ve seen before, it’s hard not to give the benefit of the doubt that a fresh enough spin can be put on it to make this JOHN WICK sequel stand out as much as its predecessor.
I think we have a really good premise, and it’s an organic premise. It’s basically — to me there’s John Wick and then there’s John. You know, John is the married guy whose wife just died, and that five years of his life. Then there’s John Wick, who’s the mythical assassin. In this, John Wick’s past comes and infiltrates John’s life and John Wick, in a way, has to fight for John.
Damn past always has to try to infringe upon the more peaceful present, doesn’t it? Those early life choices always have to try coming back to haunt someone’s tries to move on, don’t they? I get the feeling John Wick is going to put boots up the asses of those who try to mess with the new life he’s hoping to create for himself… and, while I would normally feel bad for them, I look forward to the punishment Reeves is set to dish out to those poor, unfortunate bastards.
As for Reeves applying new levels of bad-assdom to Wick, expect a few tweaks here and there, but, for the most part, you’re going to get plenty more of the same of everything you enjoyed the first time out.
We’re gonna do the same kind of thing in the sense of — what are the guiding principles? So it’s longer takes, know where you are on the space, who’s doing what, action with consequence. And then going to other levels of what the gun fu was, which was jiu-jitsu and judo mixed with weapons and different styles of weapon training. So we’ve been opening up, I’ve been learning some other tools and different styles of that, and trying to develop some more techniques in terms of judo and jiu-jitsu and bring those elements into the work. And then we have some other things that might be a little different… But it’s all organic. It’s not like all of a sudden John Wick has superpowers, it’s got to be connected to the character.
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