This piece discusses the plots of “John Wick” and “John Wick: Chapter 2.”

Director Chad Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad’s “John Wick” movies, which feature Keanu Reeves in the title role as an assassin who is back from retirement and decidedly unhappy about it, have been hailed as the next big thing in action. The violence is fast, the budgets are relatively cheap, and Wick is decidedly in control no matter how many opponents are coming at him. Adding to the mystique, films are set in a world full of low-key body removal services, an economy based on gold coins and a chain of hotels known as the Continental that function as neutral ground for hit men and managed by Winston (Ian McShane), a man with little tolerance for anyone who violates the terms of their stay.

But if “John Wick” and its recently released sequel “John Wick: Chapter 2” are the future, the social milieu they describe and the ideas about men and women that animate the films have a distinctly nostalgic streak. The result is a feel-bad vibe that puts us in an intriguing position. Just when Wick thinks he’s out, we side with the movie’s villains to pull him back in, rooting for a masculine ideal that’s as destructive as it is glamorous.

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At a moment when female characters have increasingly prominent roles in major action franchises, from Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in the Marvel movies, to Rey (Daisy Ridley) in “Star Wars” and Lieutenant Uhura (Saldana again) in “Star Trek,” the treatment of women in the “John Wick” movies is a striking throwback. If they’re not serving as secretaries, tattooed phone switchboard operators who wear identical pink blouses and place orders for assassinations, bartenders, bad singers at raves, or concierges — if they have names and any meaningful role in the action of the films — they end up dead.

Helen (Bridget Moynahan), John Wick’s ethereal wife who motivated him to retire from murdering people, dies gracefully of illness and is only ever seen again in gauzy cellphone footage and memories. Ms. Perkins (Adrianne Palicki), who plays an ambitious fellow assassin in “John Wick,” is executed after violating the rules of the Continental. An unnamed killer masquerading as a subway violinist gets pancaked early in the onslaught Wick faces when a bounty goes out on him in “John Wick: Chapter 2.” Ares (Ruby Rose), a mute, snarling killer in impeccable menswear, gets stabbed.

Most grotesquely, Italian crime boss Gianna D’Antonio (Claudia Gerini) simply commits suicide when Wick shows up to carry out a hit on her at her brother Santino’s (Riccardo Scamarcio) behest in “John Wick: Chapter 2.” The movie presents her decision to slit her wrists and bleed out in a monstrous black bathtub as an act of self-determination: She gets to determine her own death and also save Wick from the sin of killing her. Gianna is as much aesthetic object as moral actor, stripping down and shaking out her hair before cutting herself with an elaborate curved blade, her blood first coursing down her creamy skin, then unfolding delicately through the hot water of her bath like a gown. Her supposed sacrifice doesn’t even spare Wick in the end: He shoots her in the head to hasten her death once it becomes inevitable. And if Gianna gets to choose her own death, she’s doesn’t even get to explore the option to stay alive.

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Gianna is the most prominent and best-developed of the “John Wick” women who die while attempting to make it in the male-dominated field of stylish crime. That said, the “John Wick” movies generally suggest that for all its stylish trappings, membership in this men’s fraternity can be more of a trap than a privilege.

In “John Wick,” Wick and his main antagonist Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) find themselves locked in a conflict from which there is no negotiated exit. Viggo’s spoiled idiot son Iosef (Alfie Allen, making something of a specialty of these sorts of roles) kills the beagle that was Helen’s last gift to Wick in the course of stealing Wick’s beloved Mustang. The father can’t bring himself to turn over his son to be executed, and nothing will satisfy Wick except Iosef’s death. In the opening “John Wick: Chapter 2,”Abram Tarasov (Peter Stormare), Viggo’s brother, is preparing for Wick to stage an all-out assault on his office to retrieve the car. The prospect of just returning the darn thing doesn’t seem to have occurred to Abram, and Wick doesn’t bother to just ask for it. Wick declares peace only after Iosef and Viggo are dead, and Abram is thoroughly aware of his own powerlessness.

That peace doesn’t last. In “John Wick: Chapter 2,” Wick badly wants to return to his retirement, but Santino D’Antonio calls in an old marker, and Wick must honor it or die. His return to the game triggers a cascading set of violent obligations. Cassian (Common), Gianna’s bodyguard, tries to kill Wick after Gianna’s death. Santino places an enormous bounty on Wick after his sister’s killing. Wick kills Santino on the grounds of the Continental in order to liberate himself, triggering the Continental’s punishment process and goes on the run to try to stay alive. The action in “John Wick: Chapter 2” is even unique for the damage men do to each other’s genitals, from punches and kicks to one particular graphic and bloody stabbing.

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For all that the “John Wick” movies fetishize the aesthetics of this world, where everyone wears sharply cut, Kevlar-lined suits, business gets conducted in gold coins and sommeliers offer up guns suited to every occasion, there’s a depressing undercurrent to these plots. Wick may be very good at his business, but there’s never really a sense in the movies that he wants to be back in the game in spite of himself.  Viggo, Abram and Santino spend many of their scenes bathed in sweaty fear and frustration; what honor Viggo and Abram have is of the doomed, rather than triumphal sort. The only man who is free of this dynamic is the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), a kind of separatist who runs his own territory and is contemptuous of the Continental’s rigid rules and the violence that springs from them. He’s opted out of both the style that dominates “John Wick” — the Bowery King and his minions disguise themselves as homeless people — and the slaughter.

We may take pleasure in the efficiency and creativity of Wick’s killings, and even appreciate the men who push him into action, but he does not. We’re participants in Wick’s captivity to this world, and to this way of being a man: If he were ever able to really retire, to toss his guns and cache of gold in the ocean rather than simply concealing them in his basement, and to settle down to play with his new pitbull, the franchise would be over, and then where would we be?

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