The show focused on a crazed stalker of women shifts to the other side of the US and to a new target.
SUMMARY (Spoilers for Season 1)
Having killed the object of his obsession in season 1, Beck (Elizabeth Lail), Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) moves to Los Angeles to flee another of his exes, Candace (Ambyr Childers) and resolves to quit his stalker lifestyle. He gets a new identity from Will Bettelheim (Robin Lord Taylor) and gets hired at a bookstore owned by Forty Quinn (James Scully). He moves in next to reporter Delilah (Carmelo Zumbado) and her sister Ellie (Jenna Ortega), but quickly falls for another woman named Love (Victoria Pedretti). Joe attempts to change his ways for her, but his inner crazy stalker starts to come out.
Penn Badgley does a great job, just like before. It scares me.
END SUMMARY
This show has an interesting way of simultaneously being so disturbing that I don’t want to watch it but so unpredictable and creatively told that I can’t stop. It’s the only binge show where I have to take breaks for my sanity but know that I have to go back to binging it or it will eat at me to not know where the story goes. It’s even more annoying because so much of the story structure is recycled from Season 1, but it still feels surprising. I will say that, much like last season, several times it felt like the entire show changed in an episode, and it never got old.
We also have some interesting side-elements that just pop-up and they work well.
Part of what allows the show to change so frequently is that we always have a focal point in our unreliable narrator, which is usually Joe/Will narrating a story towards the object of his obsession. Since he lies to that person, and vicariously himself, frequently, he’s also deceiving the audience. The conflict between what we see objectively and what is narrated to us is one of the most compelling aspects of the show, frequently making us realize that we’re being sympathetic TO A MURDEROUS STALKER. Whereas in Season 1 we might have had hope that he really would realize the nature of his actions in time to keep himself from going over the last line he had, by this point we know that he was willing to rationalize his own actions no matter how extreme. He claims that he wants to reform, but the nature of television tells us any reformation will be replaced by another obsession. Still, that means that the viewers will always be on our toes.
He. Kills. People. And yet he has a ton of defenders on-line and I get it.
One change to the season is the presence of Candace, who was presumed to be Joe’s first victim before Beck in Season 1. It turns out that she’s not dead, but she is determined to destroy Joe’s life for what he did to her. While she is technically the antagonist, she’s clearly the anti-villain to Joe’s anti-hero. We have no sympathy for her actions from his perspective, with Joe denying any ill-intent towards her, but ultimately she is in the “right.” Joe stalks and kills women. She’s a woman. It’s amazing how much the narrative can make her seem like the crazy one, just by playing things from Joe’s point of view.
The other supporting characters in this season are a step-up from the first. They’re much more complex and contain their own hidden dark sides. Forty, who seems like a complete spoiled rich-kid with delusions of artistic grandeur, turns out to be much more relatable. Love’s friends are given more depth than Beck’s companions. Heck, we even get some flashes into Joe’s past which tell us a bit about how he got to be who he is. Just a solid improvement in this category.
Overall, this show is still disturbing, but it also has the ability to constantly surprise the viewer with all of the twists and close-calls. If you liked the first season, you’ll like this one.
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John Wick is back and killing people, but this time he’s being hunted by an entire army of professional assassins.
SUMMARY (Spoiler-Free)
Starting a few minutes after the last movie ended, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is now on the run from the “High Table” that apparently controls all of the mobs in the world after shooting Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), one of the members of the High Table who betrayed him in the previous film, while on sacred ground. The High Table has excommunicated him from all mob resources and has put a bounty on his head of $14 million, attracting every assassin in the world. John must figure out a way to get rid of the bounty while fighting off an amount of killers that makes it seem like most of the global population murders for money.
Admittedly, after killing hundreds of other people, he might forget how to not kill people.
END SUMMARY
I loved John Wick. It was an amazing action movie that basically stripped down the story as much as possible without sacrificing emotional impact and providing a lot of worldbuilding with minimum exposition. Mostly, the long-take fight sequences provided a much desired counterbalance to the rapid cut and fast moving fights we see in most other action movies, particularly those in the MCU. It’s not that the other style is bad, but it definitely feels more dramatic to be able to just show the action in its completeness, particularly since it shows the real, and extremely impressive, skills of the stunt performers. It also allows for some more aesthetically creative fights without diminishing the brutality of the violence.
Also, the use of color is… just amazing.
This movie continues all of that, but it becomes clear quickly that the filmmakers are realizing that they are running out of ways to keep making gunfights interesting without seeming repetitive, so they very cleverly figure out ways to force the fights to be different. Sometimes it’s by adding other people or animals, sometimes it’s by keeping John from having a gun and forcing them to improvise, sometimes it’s by reducing the effectiveness of John’s weapons, but the key is that every action sequence in the movie still feels original. Is it sometimes a little forced, like they have to go out of their way to avoid showing John having a gun or being able to just wreck all of the bad guys the way he previously has? Yeah, a little, but that doesn’t detract from the fun.
I mean, he uses a horse as a weapon. That’s just neat.
The world in which the film is set is expanded upon a lot, including showing us some more of the inner workings of the nebulous organization that the High Table oversees. The worldbuilding continues to be interesting and the characters that populate it are all compelling, even if they’re just a clever variation on an archetype, like the wise poor man or the shadowy ninja assassin. We also get a little more background on Wick himself, but not enough to remove the air of mystery and badass that surrounds him.
Also, Halle Berry has amazing dogs.
Basically, if you liked the first two movies, you’ll like this one.
WEIRD FAN THEORY (Mild Spoilers)
John is actually Koschei the Deathless from Russian Mythology. Now, give me a minute on this:
I mean, they even both have… beards… and skin?
John Wick’s motivation is that someone killed his dog and stole his car. At least, that’s the ostensible motive. The reality is that the dog was a gift from his late wife and the car contained one of the last mementos he had left of her. Thus, when John loses them, he is losing a part of her, the great love of his life for whom he moved heaven and Earth… or, more precisely, killed an absolutely enormous amount of people in one night, essentially accomplishing an impossible task in order to be with her. The rage that fuels John is the desire to retain the powerful love he felt for the woman he lost. Essentially, he’s doing terrible things because he no longer has his heart.
Her C.O.D. says “Plot and Motivation.” Common for women in movies.
One thing that comes up repeatedly in the films is that John’s nickname is “Baba Yaga,” translated from Russian as “the Boogeyman.” However, at one point in the first film, Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) points out that John’s not actually the Boogeyman, he’s the one you send to kill the Boogeyman. In other words, he’s the one that you would send to kill Baba Yaga.
Believe the old Russian guy.
In Russian Mythology, Baba Yaga is a witch or a magical being that takes the form of an old woman. As with most figures in Russian Fairy Tales, her role can vary wildly, going from snatching children and eating people who fail her tests to being a kindly, maternal figure who feeds lost children and helps them find their way home. Universally, though, she’s extremely powerful and immortal. In fact, there’s typically only one figure in Russian Mythology that is capable of destroying her: Koschei the Deathless. Sometimes he’s her husband, sometimes her brother, sometimes just her male counterpart, but she often is stated to know that he’s the only one who might be able to kill her. Hence, if John Wick is the guy who could kill Baba Yaga, he’d be Koschei the Deathless.
See? Here he’s even meeting Baba Yaga as Ted Theodore Logan.
While Russian Mythology tends to vary a lot, Koschei’s three main qualities are that A) he’s deathless (duh), B) he can kill anyone and is shown to be magically blessed with all weapons, and C) his heart/soul is gone. The reason why he is immortal (deathless) is because his heart is gone, and typically the only way to get rid of him is to find it. His heart is usually depicted as being hidden in some complicated nested form, such as: The heart is in a needle, the needle is in an egg, the egg is in a duck, the duck is in a hare, the hare is in a box, the box is in a log, the log is in a pond, the pond is in a forest, the forest is on an island. Essentially, it’s inside of a Matryoshka nesting doll. Without a heart, Koschei cannot die.
Also, sometimes it’s a gemstone.
What do we know about John Wick? Well, 1) he’s Russian (established in this film and implied in the first one), 2) he’s specifically a Ruska Roma, or a Russian Gypsy, a people who are known more for their performing than for their combat ability, and who are, mostly through racism, associated with myths like Baba Yaga and Koschei, 3) his name is fake, but his birth name is likely also fake, with his revealed “real name” being the equivalent of John Johnson, 4) before he had his wife, he was famous for killing people with a pencil and after he loses her, he similarly proves that he can kill anyone with anything, and 5) he can survive stuff that would kill even most action movie protagonists (particularly in this film). Note that John is only portrayed as being lethal and immortal when he doesn’t have his heart, which is to say his love, but when he is at peace (with his dogs to serve as his heart), he is beaten up by a group of two-bit punks and his house is blown up. If he doesn’t have a gaping hole to fill in his life, he’s not immortal.
He even bears a token of a Russian bond.
What does this mean? Well, first of all, I’m not saying he’s literally Koschei the Deathless, so I’m not predicting that magic or old women in chicken-legged houses are going to be in the next one (sadly), but I’m saying his story is similar. Ultimately, the only way John Wick can end is the same way any story with Koschei always ends: With someone returning his heart to him and killing him. I firmly believe that it’s only when John actually finds something to love again that he’ll be allowed to die.
Of course, I could be pulling this out of nowhere. It’s not like John Wick literally keeps one of his most treasured photos inside of a book of Russian Mythology depicting Koschei the Deathless in the New York Public Library, right? Oh, wait, that’s literally in the opening scene which I sadly can’t find a clip of online to place here. Your move, John Wick: Chapter 4.
If you enjoy these, please, like, share, tell your friends, like the Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/JokerOnTheSofa/), follow on Twitter @JokerOnTheSofa, and just generally give me a little bump. I’m not getting paid, but I like to get feedback.
The Joker On The Sofa 