While the first episode of The Continental managed to accurately and intriguingly re-skin the John Wick universe with a 70s era facelift with all the wide collars, heaped up trash and copious smoking you’d expect from New York in that particular decade. However, while the four John Wick movies themselves are masterclasses in focused plot, brushing action and flamboyant world building, The Continental thus far has taken the form of a cluttered, ensemble, crime epic that’s been content to sprawl when it should brawl.
However, while this three episode event painstakingly spent its first, feature length, episode getting us acquainted with the various thieves, murderers and psychos that will all eventually become instrumental to Winston Scott ascending to the manager of the titular hotel, the second episode (or Night 2) of the show finally grants us a bit of forward motion that gets us on the road to the inevitable climax.
After a lifetime of crime, grifting and tempting fate, Frankie Scott’s wayward ways had finally caught up with him after his theft of a priceless coin press from monstrous crime boss Cormac O’Connor resulted in a 7mm craniotomy delivered by sniper rifle wielding goons.
Survived by his estranged brother, Winston and his Vietnamese wife, Yen, the traumatised couple vow that the rule of O’Connor has to come to an end, but taking out a powerful kingpin isn’t going to be as simple as striding into his establishment and popping a cap in his brain box when his guard is down simply because of the fact that he runs the Continental – a glorified hideout/residence/safehouse for every hitman, killer and criminal who can afford its luxuries. Simply put, you can’t just storm the titular hotel, you’ll have to take it over outright , so Winston has no other choice but to try to rope together a strike team formed of himself, the manically venguful Yen, gun-running siblings Miles and Lou and their buddy, Lemmy and short sighted hitman Jenkins.
All agree due to various personal and professional concerns and in an effort to gather an army to help, Winston truly starts to see the scope of New York’s criminal underworld when he stumbles upon the Bowery, a network of homeless people who have been given purpose by the assembling of an invisible criminal empire that hides in plain sight.
However, O’Connor isn’t exactly having a good time of it himself as he’s getting pressure from the Adjudicator – the masked mouthpiece of the mysterious High Table – to get the coin press back at any cost, but unkbewonst to him, Winston has approached his devoted concierge, Charon, to betray him as his man on the inside…
Now don’t get me wrong. I didn’t dislike The Continental’s first episode at all and I thought of utilizing the 70s to set the scene was something of an ingenious masterstroke, however, for a trio of feature length episodes that’s set themselves up to precede arguably the most influential action series of the past ten years (everyone fights like Wick now), the show didn’t exactly move with purpose.
After a very Wick-esque opening that saw Ben Robson’s doomed Frankie Scott swipe a vital coin press from under the nose of Mel Gibson’s volatile crime boss, the show pumped the breaks hard, taking us on a tour of version 0.5 of the mythic, yet bafflingly complicated world in which Wick operates without bother to truly explain any of it. The references were legion (the callback to Uncle Charlie was an especially nice touch) and the tone was firmly set thanks to the endless toe-tapping needle drops that infuse almost every scene with a dangerous cool, but even though the episode ended with Frankie getting assassinated and his brother Winston vowing revenge, it didn’t feel like anything actually happened.
Well, thankfully Night 2 manages to change that by primarily taking form of a recruitment story as all the characters finally start to mingle in a meaningful way due to Winston’s organisation skills. Forming a team from Kung Fu school owing gunrunners Miles and Lou, Frankie’s savage warrior widow, Yen and an aging sniper who likes the idea of shaking up the status quo, the show morphs from a directionless crime epic, to a slightly more focused heist movie that adds some needed drive.
Regrettably, Colin Woodell’s proto-Winston still isn’t fully formed enough to be more than just a vanilla leading man – ascot or no – but the rest of the characters are now starting to come into their own. Most fascinating so far is Nhung Kate’s rage filled Yen, essentially now a Vietnamese woman stranded in 70s New York with no outlet for her devastating skills since Frankie, her husband, took a fatal headshot and her mounting frustration continues when she finds out that Winston managed to procure his brother’s body illegally from the morgue and cremated it without notifying her stokes her hatred even more. Equalling her for potential is Jessica Allain’s Lou, whose adherence to her father’s martial art teachings and insistence that she will use any weapon at her disposal except a gun hints that when the action finally ups its scale, these two women will be the ones to watch.
Elsewhere, everyone one else gets a little more room to play. Gibson gets to go full beast mode and beat a cellist to a bloody pulp with a golf club, Katie McGrath gets to be more ominous behind her doll mask as the High Table’s Adjudicator and – most importantly – we finally get the origins of the relationship between Winston and Ayomide Adegun’s softly spoken Charon, although the fact that it seemingly starts with a betrayal makes it nice and unpredictable (unless it’s a Ocean’s Eleven style long-run, of course). Another fascinating addition is a welcome glimpse at the early days of the Bowery that’s destined to be ruled by a bellowing Laurence Fishburne in John Wick 2 and the explanation that its troops aren’t crooks dressed as the homeless, but the actual homeless weaponized into being crooks with the power of self respect is a bit of back story that works really well. However, despite now being two-thirds of the way though, the side plot of detectives KD and Mayhew is noticably going nowhere and I’m genuinely unsure to why it exists in the first place.
Despite a renewed focus in the plot – to properly kill O’Connor they can’t just snuff him an leave; they have to make a coup of the entire hotel – The Continental still feels like its holding itself back for a huge finish that’ll hopefully give us the unrelenting action blowout that a John Wick prequel deserves – nay, needs – to finish on in order for it to measure up to the legacy of the franchise.
Loyalty To The Master is a better episode than the first and the choice to go down the sustained, coiled spring route is admirable, but if The Continental doesn’t unleash the maelstrom of carnage that the franchise requires, the notorious hotel might find that its lost a few bookings due to some frustrated cancellations.
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