Was finally witness to the awesomeness last night. Halfway through, I was thinking "you know, I'd love to see a spin-off movie with Common's character, Cassian. Oh, well......never mind."
Okay, long rambling here: In recent years, the greatest action movies that didn't have John Wick in the title were the two Raid movies. They are brilliant. I now see that The Raid movies and the John Wick movies are eerily similar (and all brilliant).
The first Raid movie can be summed up in one sentence (an elite police force gets trapped in a high-rise filled with heavily armed criminals and must fight their way out). The Raid 2: Berandal has a much deeper plot with twists and turns and more characters with backstory. It takes the world of the first movie and spends much more time exploring it.
That is exactly what we get with the John Wick movies. The first is "Russian thugs kill his dog and steal his car and he kills everyone." The second opens up the world we glimpsed in the first and takes us into it.
Both The Raid 2 and John Wick Chapter 2 are not as gleefully insane as their first films, but they are much deeper and therefore better movies than the first.
I hope production begins very soon on John Wick: the Final Chapter.
Oh, and I am 110% against the Joe Carnahan remake of The Raid. Do not want.