The first attack looks pretty snappy to me, but the second one still looks a little slow. Richter Belmont's animation, for reference, only has him actually swinging the whip for 3/6 of his attack frames; two of the frames are used for the whip being in straight attack position, and one is him simply putting his arm behind him. It's all super quick, and a third of the animation is just the whip being in a rigid "this will kill you!" looking position. With yours, even for his first attack, which looks pretty quick, there's still this feeling that he's simply smacking the air with it, like it's lacking bite.
I don't really know how I'd go about making it look meaner, since you obviously want him to be able to chain attacks together quickly and smoothly, but....maybe it's not possible with a whip-like weapon? Iirc, Secret of Mana's whip actually only had *two*(!!!!) frames for it's attack animation. And again, the whip was lashed straight out, super rigid looking for the attack. Good luck though, hahah. I think a mean looking whip is going to be pretty tough to animate when you want to allow these kinds of acrobatics while using it. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with! =)
Edit: Like you said, something that isn't a plain whip might look better like this...what you've got looks like it was inspired by God of War a bit, which kind of worked because he had those huge knives on the ends of his chains, so it was obvious that the graceful swinging motions would still do damage. You might want to do something like a morning star, like you said earlier. That might work a bit better in this situation, especially if you had the character using his own momentum to get the morning star moving during combos. Could end up looking really cool, while still allowing you to let the character smoothly jump and spin around and such. =D
Edit edit: Just looked up some whip videos on youtube to see what they actually look like, and your animation seems pretty realistic...I think the real problem here is that whips really aren't very good weapons, only giving the victim minor cuts and things, unlike a real weapon made for causing serious damage. Which is probably why the two games that I know of that feature whips as weapons (Secret of Mana and Casltevania) don't animate them realistically at all, hahah. You really may want to go with a morning star instead/chain and sickle/whatever instead, lol. Then again, if you included a bunch of the awesome "wa-KSHSHSHS!!" sound effects while your guy is flipping out waving it around everywhere, it might end up pretty awesome in its own way, hahah!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNKPIOelTgA