John Wick: Chapter 2
Summit Entertainment | Release Date: February 10, 2017 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
75
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 43 Critic Reviews
Positive:
36
Mixed:
6
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
MTV NewsAmy NicholsonFeb 10, 2017
In the first film, his rhythmic overkills felt brutal. Here, they're more like a dance, and the best bits of the movie have a lightness that made me giggle with delight. Read full review
90
ScreenCrushBritt HayesFeb 9, 2017
A righteous follow-up that’s bigger and maybe not better, but just as good as its predecessor. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangFeb 9, 2017
The movie may look like disposable goods — it’s a sequel, a shoot-’em-up, starring an actor too often treated as a punchline — but it is also a connoisseur’s delight, a down-and-dirty B-picture with a lustrous A-picture soul. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekFeb 9, 2017
John Wick: Chapter 2 has style to burn, and oh! what violence — terrible, bone-crunching, glorious violence, beautifully orchestrated by director Chad Stahelski. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzFeb 9, 2017
The film’s delightful collision of the poetic and the profane is illustrated perfectly about midway through Chapter 2. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comAngelica Jade BastienFeb 9, 2017
A more audacious film, bolder and more violent than its predecessor. It’s also surprisingly hilarious, wringing humor from physical pratfalls and dry wit in unexpected moments. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonFeb 9, 2017
Reeves is thoroughly persuasive as a killer who takes pride in his expertise. The role he began with 2014’s “John Wick” is tailor-made for his laconic acting style. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversFeb 9, 2017
Remember how the original John Wick snuck up and wowed us in 2014? Now he's back and better than ever. John Wick: Chapter 2 is the real deal in action-movie fireworks – it's pure cinema, an adrenaline rocket of image and sound that explodes on contact. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperFeb 9, 2017
Just when we thought Keanu Reeves was destined for a career of mostly forgettable films piling up in our straight-to-video cues, the guy is headlining a bona fide, first-class action franchise. Whoa. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineJake ColeFeb 8, 2017
John Wick: Chapter 2 remarkably balances its predecessor’s spartan characterizations and plotting with a significant expansion of scale. Read full review
83
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerFeb 9, 2017
Chapter 2 is a hyper-violent piece of pulp action cinema through and through, but it’s also an exemplar of how to make such a film with style and intelligence. Read full review
83
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallFeb 9, 2017
This movie's balletic brutality, its relentless pacing and practical stunt work are breathtaking. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyFeb 8, 2017
Lavishly expanding on the first film’s comic-book-esque internal mythology and its sense of the absurd, it’s less of a pure genre movie than its predecessor—more gothic, more narratively stylized, its superlative stuntwork sometimes taking a back seat to visual gags and vignettes of deadpan comedy. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyFeb 6, 2017
The idea of a secret world of professional killers adhering to a set of civilized conventions may sound absurd, but it’s what makes the Wickverse more intriguing and far richer than the usual numbskull orgy of cinematic nihilism. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnFeb 6, 2017
As relentless, eager-to-please genre filmmaking goes, it marks the rare occasion where too much of a good thing is just good enough. Read full review
80
Total FilmJames MottramFeb 16, 2017
True, John Wick: Chapter 2 doesn’t quite hit the heights of the original – partly because the element of surprise when it comes to the fight-work is gone, partly because it lacks the emotional pull of Wick avenging his wife’s memory. But as badass B-movies go, this really gets the blood pumping. Read full review
80
CineVueJamie NeishFeb 7, 2017
This is a sequel that advances on its predecessor in a way that's incredibly satisfying - and not only for the body count and beautifully constructed action scenes it delivers. Read full review
80
Time Out LondonTom HuddlestonFeb 6, 2017
What a stupendously entertaining ride it is. Director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski is back in the director’s chair, and he knows his craft inside out: every punch lands hard, every gunshot roars like thunder. Read full review
80
EmpireChris Hewitt (1)Feb 6, 2017
A brutal, bruising bullet ballet of a sequel that builds upon the promise of the original. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterJustin LoweFeb 6, 2017
Once again, Reeves does not disappoint, fully inhabiting Wick by channeling his rage over life’s injustices into an intensely focused performance. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeFeb 6, 2017
There’s a quality to the violence here that elevates it above the literal (and reprehensible) nihilism of movies like last year’s “Hardcore Henry,” and instead achieves something more akin to dance. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenFeb 8, 2017
John Wick: Chapter 2 also has a very good humor about itself. Read full review
76
The VergeTasha RobinsonFeb 10, 2017
John Wick: Chapter 2 is an enjoyable enough expansion on the first film. But its final-act setup for John Wick: Chapter 3 is more trying than promising. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliFeb 13, 2017
This is “more of the same” but, at least in this case, that’s a good thing. Read full review
75
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanFeb 9, 2017
It isn’t easy to explain the appeal of the “John Wick” movies, and they are inarguably not for every taste, but there is a purity to them that transcends their barbarity and has something to do with the central character. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTom RussoFeb 9, 2017
For audiences with an extremely high tolerance for brutally fetishized shootouts and bloodletting, this continuation of Reeves’s potential-filled reluctant hit man saga is electrifying, both visually and in its cracked narrative ambitions. Read full review
75
The Film StageNick NewmanFeb 8, 2017
Whether or not John Wick: Chapter 2 is superior to its counterpart matters little when the experience is worth enjoying unto itself. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreFeb 8, 2017
The fists fly, the bullets blaze and the mayhem borders on magnificent in John Wick: Chapter 2, a sequel that ups the artistic ante even as it boosts the body count of that sleeper hit about the assassin’s assassin played by Keanu Reeves. Read full review
75
The PlaylistKevin JagernauthFeb 6, 2017
John Wick: Chapter 2 doesn’t mess with a good thing, expanding the setting as sequels are obligated to do, while firmly sticking to the foundations of what makes the action series such pure popcorn pleasure. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinFeb 13, 2017
For a movie so visual (how many shades of blue can you count?), John Wick: Chapter 2 has quite a clever script. Derek Kolstad anchors that abstract action with good, spiky passages of dialogue. Read full review
70
We Got This CoveredMatt DonatoFeb 9, 2017
John Wick: Chapter 2 tempts fate with a 122-minute running time, but the "Gun Fu" is back and it's just as deathly awesome as it was in the first film. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzFeb 9, 2017
Reeves was born to this kind of role — quiet, moody, looks nice in black. He’s just as good as he was in the first film, because he’s exactly the same. In many ways, so is the film. That’s fine this time around, because John Wick: Chapter 2 is just as crazily entertaining. Read full review
70
SlateMatthew DessemFeb 9, 2017
Most of all, Kolstad and Stahelski get a lot of mileage from the intricate details of the secret society of assassins Wick belongs to. Read full review
70
Village VoiceBilge EbiriFeb 6, 2017
This new film doesn’t have the emotional grounding of the original, and it probably dwells too long explaining things we never cared about. But it’s still a visceral, cathartic and — most important — gorgeous two hours of kinetic, poetic bloodshed. Read full review
70
TheWrapRobert AbeleFeb 6, 2017
John Wick’s world is elegant and vicious, full of slaughter and courtesies and, if “Chapter 2” can’t quite replicate the original’s sense of discovery, its ending still made me wish “Chapter 3” could start right away. Read full review
63
The Seattle TimesSoren AndersenFeb 8, 2017
It’s all kind of funny, actually, and deliberately so. Director Chad Stahelskii, a former stunt man, stages a flailing fight down a seemingly endless flight of stairs that is like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeyFeb 16, 2017
Chapter 2 does its job entirely ably, without exactly doing much overtime. Read full review
60
The New York TimesJeannette CatsoulisFeb 9, 2017
The plot matters only inasmuch as it allows the returning director, Chad Stahelski, to stage his spectacular fight sequences in various stunning Roman locations, where they unfold with an almost erotic brutality. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottFeb 8, 2017
John Wick: Chapter Two is still an exceedingly dumb guilty-pleasure film, with its high body count, shockingly bloody violence and creative comic-book carnage. But that hotel, known as The Continental, and the structure it provides the film, goes a long way to helping John Wick: Chapter 2 become its own distinct, ultraviolent thing. Read full review
50
New York PostKyle SmithFeb 9, 2017
The first “John Wick” was taut and nasty, a potent slug of B-movie. This one is so enamored of its own extravagance that, on more than one occasion, I was reminded of “Zoolander 2.” Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsFeb 8, 2017
John Wick 2 stages its gun-fu melees sleekly and sometimes well, from the catacombs of Rome to the subway platforms of New York City. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsEdward DouglasFeb 6, 2017
If you loved the original movie, you might not care so much about being given warmed-over seconds. Otherwise, this Wick has burned itself out. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleFeb 9, 2017
No, this is not good. This is just not good. Read full review
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