John Wick: Chapter 2 is only rarely a movie about two people having a fight, because only a handful of people in the John Wick universe can go toe-to-toe with Wick. No, John Wick: Chapter 2 is about trying to get inside the head of — maybe even empathize with — a death machine.
Wick’s world, which seems to operate by some mysterious assassin’s code that may as well have been handed down wholesale from the middle ages, is always needlessly byzantine when something more straightforward would do. But Wick himself is as stripped-down and simple in his motivations as possible. In 2014’s John Wick, he avenged the death of his dog; in the new sequel, he’s mad somebody burned down his house ( though this grows more complicated) .