One of the best movies I’ve seen recently is Nagisa Oshima’s last film, “Gohatto” (1999), about the stern codes of samurai warriors and the violent passions that those codes constrained—and about the political order that they defended, reinforced, or threatened. The politics are inseparable from the passions; Oshima dramatizes the conjoined societal pathologies of political and erotic repression while also staging thrillingly choreographed displays of the warriors’ martial artistry, the sublimity of their cruelty.

No fair to club the new with the old, but what Oshima shows is what Chad Stahelski, the director of the “John Wick” series, doesn’t, in both the first film and in “John Wick: Chapter 2,” which opens today. Stahelski offers no sense that the hit man John Wick (Keanu Reeves) and the worldwide hit crowd that he runs with (and against) is in any way tethered to its place and time, that there are any stakes at all in the success or failure of their missions, in their survival or death, beyond their own existence. Both films are mere technical exercises that, by rights, should serve mainly as feature-length advertisements for the real films underlying them: the making-of documentaries.

The first “John Wick” was a terminal bore flecked with touches of wit, centered on the New York hit-person headquarters of the Continental Hotel (ostensibly* *this downtown landmark), where the manager, Winston (Ian McShane), is the all-controlling arbiter, and the imperturbable desk clerk (Lance Reddick) is his right-hand man. A former killer for a New York Russian-mob kingpin, Wick got married and then retired. But his wife gets sick and dies; just days later, consoled only by a dog that she left him for company, Wick has a violent confrontation with the kingpin’s son and vows revenge (“You stole my car and you killed my dog”). So Wick is back, unwillingly reintegrated into the bureaucracy of contract killers (the odd touch is the central phone line for “dinner reservations,” actually a body-disposal service) and engaged in a killing spree (guns, knives, hands, cars, whatever) that leaves him battered, unsatisfied, and awaiting a sequel.

“John Wick: Chapter 2” is a much wilder ride than the first installment, and it also pushes much harder on the old-fashioned formality of the contract killer’s code. Its very MacGuffin is downright Damon Runyon–esque, and Stahelski realizes it with touches of anachronistic décor that might have been surplus from a Wes Anderson shoot. Wick is cozily mourning in his sleek and glassy New Jersey home, in the company of the dog that he got at the end of the first film, when the gangster Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) shows up and calls in Wick’s marker (a coin-like case containing Wick’s thumbprint in blood), demanding that Wick commit a killing on his behalf. Wick refuses; Santino persuasively torches Wick’s house; and Wick takes on the assignment—to go to Rome and kill Santino’s sister, Gianna (Claudia Gerini), whose place in the family business Santino intends to take.

In order to get back to work, Wick needs supplies for the job, and Stahelski amuses himself with the luxurious formality of the hit man’s shopping spree. It involves a visit to a private Hasidic banker, who, upon Wick’s delivery of his code (“fifty-nine, zero, three-point-five”), provides him with the coin of the realm: gold coins; a stop at a custom tailor who makes fine menswear containing only the best of bulletproof linings; and a visit to a so-called sommelier (Peter Serafinowicz), who purveys world-class weaponry with oenophilic sales pitches. Part of the trick is the deceptive façade of civil society: to get to the sommelier, Wick passes through a bookstore that hides a sweatshop whose forewoman leads him to the “wine” merchant, whose stock-in-trade is a Second Amendment fundamentalist’s wet dream.

Gianna is at her enormous compound, seemingly an ancient city within a city, where a large crowd is attending a loud and flashy concert—but her bodyguards, members of the same virtual guild as Wick, are there, too. One (Ruby Rose) sees him from afar; another bumps into him in the crowd and they exchange professional greetings; and, after coaxing Gianna toward her fate and dashing to the catacombs, Wick meets a whole battalion of them. They emerge seemingly from nowhere and he shoots it out with them, leaving a trail of blood and viscera and exploding heads that have all the emotional impact of watermelon salad. But her lead bodyguard, Cassian (played by Common), is honor-bound to avenge her death (“You killed my ward”), and they grapple and grunt their way through Roman settings before being forced, stunned and bleeding, into a tenuous truce and eventually resuming their duel in New York.

The secret society within society gives rise to Stahelski’s finest inspirations. A contract is put out by a phone call to “accounts payable,” a back office run by women straight out of the nineteen-forties whose ledger books and rubber stamps are vestiges of “Bartleby” and whose primordial electronic gear must have survived the Late Telex Era. When the contracts go out, cell phones light up around the world—and right here at home, in the hands of a violinist busking near Lincoln Center, apparent dawdlers on park benches, and homeless people on streets and in subway corridors. As a result, Wick finds himself either working with or defending against the killers embedded among us, and neither collateral damage nor geography is an obstacle. (One of the exemplary set pieces takes place in the crowded, brand-new downtown Oculus, which appears, in the movie, to be connected to the subbasement of Lincoln Center.) Yet another kingpin, one played by Laurence Fishburne, does his business from a rumpled Lower East Side rooftop where, to all appearances, he mainly superintends a flock of carrier pigeons. The movie’s only too-good-to-spoil twist is a paranoia-inducing vision of secret agents hiding in plain sight, under rigorously centralized control.

Did I mention that “John Wick: Chapter 2” opens with a wordless, furiously churning car-and-motorcycle chase that starts in Manhattan’s theatre district and moves toward a plein-air auto compound? Or that it features extended takes of martial-arts wrestling and tumbling, bone-cracking and knife-thrusting and head-blasting? Or that a long set piece in an art museum is based on the mirror-maze shoot-out in Orson Welles’s “The Lady From Shanghai”? According to the production notes and several published interviews with Reeves, the actor did the driving and the martial-arts balletics and ballistics himself, which is good to hear—because, had it not been mentioned, a viewer would likely never know it. Despite the long takes and the wide angles, the traumatic violence looks like expertly realized C.G.I., combined with elaborately sampled stunt work. The publicity campaign on behalf of Reeves’s devoted exertions is a better story than the one that the film depicts.

Reeves’s admirably minimalist expressivity and air of distraction, as if he is perpetually tuned into a higher frequency, lends Wick a deceptive semblance of substance that the script doesn’t define and the action doesn’t dramatize. The great action directors are also great inaction directors; whether Martin Scorsese or Jean-Pierre Melville, they realize a vision of the world in which violence is an inextricable element of political power or a comedic manifestation of tragic derangements and delusions. In “Haywire,” Steven Soderbergh put the martial-arts prowess of Gina Carano in the spotlight; his direction conveyed the physical presence of her deft maneuvers, not least because he let the strings and wires show—not any material ones that go into stunt work but the virtual ones that connect her character to the conflicts of the times. The only worldly thing that “John Wick: Chapter 2” is about is the impending release of Chapter 3.