KEANU REEVES BACK BLASTING IN JOHN WICK CHAPTER 2

Keanu finds himself in a brand new franchise YEAR: 2016

I'm not that guy anymore...

A line uttered by JOHN WICK, again played by Keanu Reeves, in the new venture: Yet you'd think this kind of morose surrender would come after three or four movies, having gotten to know "that guy" a lot better. And this sequel is referred to as CHAPTER 2, which makes sense since the original action-packed sleeper was very basic and satisfying i.e. more like a chapter than a book...

WickTwoScore: *

Of course you know he'll return to being the same old killer once again but it takes a while to get there. Other than an explosive round of lethal karate within the first ten minutes, feeling more like a rushed montage than a catapult, there's a dull hour of exposition; Wick roaming with his dog (that had replaced the puppy killed in the first); and then finally getting an actual task... to kill a powerful woman... but with a price — and a confusing, uninteresting one at that... 

Making the rest of the picture a bloody bagful of ultra-violence featuring an excessive and tiresome amount of bullets to the brain-spraying heads of numerous thugs. Their lives as important as the vacant plot-line. And subtitles with a silly teenage-font punctuating certain words makes the slow parts more banal than the video game gunfights. A shame since the first chapter was a really nice surprise while this WICK fizzles from the start.