For the week of June 12th, Summit and Lionsgate Home Entertainment are bringing John Wick: Chapter 2 to Blu-ray. As the title suggests, director Chad Stahelski's film is a direct continuation of his and David Leitch's thrilling 2014 action melodrama; we begin only days after the events that concluded the first John Wick, with the titular character (Keanu Reeves: the man, the legend) wreaking holy hell on some Russian mobsters (led by a very funny Peter Stormare) to get back his beloved 1969 Ford Mustang. Stahelski distills everything fans love about these movies into this ten-minute sequence: it's violent, visually precise (no quick cuts or shakycam here: Stahelski was a former stuntman, so he knows how to stage action for maximum impact AND spatial clarity), and diverse, both in terms of the action itself (we start with a car chase, then move into shadow takedowns, then get some lightning-fast shootouts, and end on a deeply satisfying blend of vehicular carnage and grueling hand-to-hand combat) and the tonal approach. Not for nothing does Stahelski begin the film with a reference to Buster Keaton - for all the chaos and death, his film thrives off deliciously deadpan approach to the mayhem. It's a little disappointing, then, when this opening action setpiece ends, and John Wick: Chapter 2 settles into a forty-minute stretch of expository table-setting. We meet the new Big Bad (Riccardo Scamarcio's sneering, eminently punchable crime boss) and watch Wick prepare for an assassination in Rome, and while this material isn't bad (I get such a kick watching Wick negotiate the ins and outs of his secret assassin community, the lore of which is even denser and more insane this go-around - the once-and-future Darth Maul Peter Serafinowicz steals the movie as "The Sommelier," a wine aficionado who's also a genius at pairing any dangerous situation with the exact right kind of firepower), forty minutes is a long time to go in a franchise that prides itself on consistent, propulsive violence. I needn't have worried. Right around the time Wick simultaneously achieves his mission and realizes he's being double-crossed, Chapter 2 becomes a nearly seventy-minute orgy of destruction as Wick starts hunting Scamarcio. I'm hard pressed to pick a favorite moment - would it be either of the two bloody throwdowns he has with Common's principled bodyguard? the race through the NYC subway system while eluding what feels like every major and minor assassin on the East Coast? the end shootout, a gunfight in an art museum that includes an extended homage to Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, of all movies? - but again, it's Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad's skewed, absurdist take on the proceedings that keeps the film from feeling oppressively brutal. Only in the John Wick universe would we get the delightful moment where, mid-fight, Wick and Common's characters take a breather to enjoy some scotch, or the whole subplot with the "Bowery King" (a nutty turn from Reeves's old Matrix buddy Larry Fishburne, who between this and Predators is becoming the King of Crazy Mid-Film Cameos), or anything featuring Ian McShane's cultivated hotel manager/assassin-code arbiter. When all is said done, my biggest complaint with John Wick: Chapter 2 is that it ends, and on a fairly irresistible cliffhanger to boot. These movies are now the Gold Standard of American Action Filmmaking - everything else suffers by comparison.
Of John Wick: Chapter 2, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that it's "not to say that this film doesn't have its own stumbling blocks, albeit probably fairly minor ones. The biggest one is a completely needless episode that introduces Italian gangster Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), who shows up at Wick's gorgeous ultramodern mansion to collect on a 'marker' that D'Antonio had gotten from Wick back in the day...In a series of events that is rote at best and pretty hackneyed at worst, Wick of course demurs to help D'Antonio's request for 'help,' leading D'Antonio to destroy Wick's home on the spot....Some inquiring minds may want to know what exactly the whole initial scene between Wick and D'Antonio served to provide the story other than a chance to have a luxe mansion go up in flames. Suffice it to say that plans don't go, well, according to plan, leaving John in desperate straits once the true levels of D'Antonio's villainy are revealed (wanting to have his sister killed is only the tip of this particular iceberg). As with the first film, once the pieces have been set into place, Stahelski simply flicks the first domino (so to speak), leading to a cascading series of awesomely staged fight scenes as John has to take on one adversary after another...I'm not quite sure what I think about Laurence Fishburne's character of The Bowery Lord...but otherwise the film offers some nicely done supporting roles for everyone from Common as one of D'Antonio's bodyguards to Franco Nero, manager of Rome's Continental Hotel, where all the best hitmen stay. As with the first film, the story may not ultimately offer incredible depth, but it certainly supports one of the most fearsome assortments of set pieces in recent film history."
The other big release of the week is Warner Home Entertainment's The LEGO Batman Movie. As a Batman story, this film is pretty stellar. Even though it's a full-on comedy, LEGO Batman gets the psychology of the title character (Will Arnett, reprising his scene-stealing role from The LEGO Movie) better than 90% of the live-action Batman ventures, and I'm including the Christopher Nolan entries, too. This Batman might be vain, arrogant, and deeply deluded about his greatness, but he's also lonely and suffering from great trauma. If you guessed we get another iteration of Bruce Wayne's parents getting killed, you'd be right, except the PG-rating forces director Chris McKay and his team to convey that heartbreak with genuine economy. No flashbacks here: just a bittersweet family photograph on the wall of Bruce Wayne's mansion, and that's enough to convey Batman's fear of connecting with those around him. Hell, he can't even tell The Joker (Zach Galifianakis, who's a bit of a letdown as the main villain - where's Mark Hamill when you need him?) that the Crown Prince of Crime is his greatest adversary, and so The Joker mounts a Phantom Zone-spanning scheme to, in essence, get Batman to say he loves him. All that, and it often plays like a feature-length episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, given its anarchic spirit and predilections for mining Batman's comically deep bench of criminal rogues: I don't think I've laughed harder at a movie all year than when The Joker breaks character to tell a doomed pilot that, yes, all the villains backing him - which include ridiculous people like Crazy Quilt, Polka Dot Man, Gentleman Ghost, Condiment King, Egghead, and a sentient eraser named Eraser - are actual Batman foes. However, as an entry in the LEGO Movie universe, I'm a bit more mixed. I love the energy and speed of everything, and Arnett once again proves a delightful Dark Knight, although the MVP award this time around goes to his former Arrested Development co-star Michael Cera, whose excitable, painfully eager Dick Grayson/Robin plays like a slightly (stress slight) more cocksure version of his George Michael character (the way Cera breathlessly whispers "Only if I desire to be" in response to Batman asking him if he can be quiet is a small marvel of comic understatement). The bigger issue, though, is that much of the proceedings play like a slightly tweaked Xerox of the first LEGO Movie. Same winking irony, same hyperkinetic razzle-dazzle, same reference-heavy in-jokes: if the previous LEGO Movie had a ball introducing an oversized superheroes guild (many of whom make small cameos here), this one doubles down on an eclectic roster of Big Bads running the gamut from Gremlins to the literal Eye of Sauron (voiced by one of New Zealand's greatest imports). And if the formula is still entertaining (loved the whiplash montage summarizing Batman's entire screen history), it doesn't have the element of surprise that The LEGO Movie did. Furthermore, The LEGO Batman Movie is far more transparent in handling its Big Themes than its predecessor. The miraculous thing about The LEGO Movie is that filmmakers Chris Miller and Phil Lord succeeded in simultaneously lampooning the hackneyed beats of the Hero's Journey while adhering to them faithfully, whereas LEGO Batman's pickup-basketball-team-of-a-script-committee (Seth Grahame-Smith, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jared Stern, and John Whittington) defaults to having characters artlessly blurt out that No One Can Get Through Life Alone. In fairness, the film is smart enough to have Ralph Fiennes (as Alfred) and Rosario Dawson (playing Barbara Gordon) handling these duties with sincerity and good humor, but that still doesn't excuse the clunky mechanics. Maybe I'm carping too much. Ultimately, The LEGO Batman Movie works - it's easily about a thousand times better than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, so there's that.
From the Criterion Collection comes one of the greatest debut features ever made: Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night. So many iconic filmmakers cut their teeth on low-budget noirs, and one could argue that Ray set this vocational template for people like Christopher Nolan and the Coen Brothers to follow. Like Nolan's Following or the Coens' Blood Simple, They Live by Night is the stuff of lurid melodramas, focusing on the doomed romance between a vulnerable gas-station clerk (the luminous Cathy O'Donnell) and a wounded prison escapee (Farley Granger, never better) as they try to evade Granger's former partner (a terrifying Howard Da Silva). However, Ray proves just as adept as Nolan and the Coens at subverting whatever genre expectations we might bring to the picture. The first time I saw They Live By Night, I had to keep reminding myself to breathe, and not because of any particular violent shock or plot twist. What proves overwhelming about Ray's work here is how tender it is. Lest we forget, Ray is the same guy who gave the angry-teen genre a surreal, homoerotic gloss with Rebel Without a Cause and used a serial-killer story to Trojan-Horse a lacerating, semi-autobiographical-analysis into In a Lonely Place. What he's done here - promising a B-movie caper and delivering as sensitive and intimate a relationship drama as I've ever seen - feels even more bracing. Ray cares about O'Donnell and Granger, and he stretches out the moments they share - the long night where Granger and O'Donnell first fall in love; their heartbreaking attempts to create a "normal" family while hiding out in a remote forest bungalow. It's one of the great films about young love, and we don't dare decry it as sentimental (Ray gets away with so many gauzy soft-focus shots and intimate close-ups) because we always feel the specter of Granger's old life, are always aware that he's fated for a more brutal end (a typically idiosyncratic Ray touch: as fearsome as Da Silva's one-eyed heavy looks, the brute yearns for someone to care about him as much as Granger does). In that sense, the title is perfect: only in the shadows could this impossible, beautiful union thrive, and even then not for long. To call They Live by Night one of the best film noirs ever made feels too limited; this is one of the great films period.
Svet Atanasov's Blu-ray review noted that "one part of [the film] is dedicated to the evolution of the romantic relationship between two young people that basically wish to find a safe and quiet place where they can begin a new and perfectly normal life together. So as they become more and more comfortable with each other, they essentially begin to plan their future in the same predictable manner that all young couples do. The other part of the film, however, refuses to accept them as a 'normal' couple. It sees them as doomed renegades that are attracted to each other only because they are desperately trying to break free from their past - Bowie seeks justice but is forced to become a criminal so that he can actually have a chance to prove that he is innocent, while Keechie has had enough of her drunk father's abuse and is now convinced that by running away with Bowie she is reclaiming her freedom. So here not only is their love observed from a different angle, but is completely overwhelmed by a very strong sense of noirish fatalism. The casual tone of the exchanges and the profiles of the lovers that they help create are unusual to say the least because during the late 1940s and early 1950s the big Hollywood romantic melodramas were promoting completely different types of characters with drastically different personalities."