About John Wick’s Action Style
Watching Kate this weekend, I realised how fed up I was about action movies latest gimmicks: i.e Gun-Fu, “tacticool” reloads and other impressive moves introduced or revitalised by the John Wick franchise. And yet, I remember being super excited by John Wick very first trailer and delighted by most of his adventures. What happened? Let’s try to find out!
John Wick came out in 2014 and became an instant classic. Inspired by comic books and graphic novels in its world-building and Hong Kong action cinema when it comes to filming fight scenes, the movie co-directed by Chad Stahelski and David Leitch made a big splash in the action scene, which at the time, was often criticised for its overly cut fights and shaky cameras. It made enough noise and money for Hollywood to notice, and in fact most of its studios did.
We’ve seen a lot of John Wick-like movies ever since, and both Stahelski and Leitch, who were previously known for having worked on stunts for the Matrix franchise, became big household names: Chad Stahelski started to develop and direct John Wick in a proper franchise while David Leith went for tentpoles like Deadpool 2 or Hobbs & Shaw. And both of them were consulted to boost the fights of movies like Captain America: Civil War or Birds of Prey.
In short: Hollywood had found a new action system, a paradigm of sorts. In 2014, it was exciting and fresh, and even better, good enough to make people forgive about entire years of poorly designed action. And for a while, everyone was happy. Until the new system started to show its flaws.
Of course, no directing style is perfect, but the more it is used or copied — and you can always count on good old Hollywood for that — the more evident its weaknesses become. See, for instance, how Micheal Bay’s style was imitated ad nauseam throughout the 2000s. Anyway.
Let’s go back to Kate, a movie directed by my fellow French citizen Cedric Nicolas-Troyan and choreographed by Jonathan Eusebio, who had previously worked on Birds of Prey with actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead, aka the aforementioned Kate of this female assassin flick.
After Extraction, Atomic Blonde or Nobody, Kate shows how thrilling the John Wick style and all its gimmick can be, but also how empty they can feel. So here’s what I gathered from watching the latest assassin in town.
The more the merrier?
Most of the John Wick-like movies start with a small but really intricate fight. Usually: a duel or a series of duels where the main character will use fists, surrounding objects, knives or a handgun. And there’s a reason for that, it creates tension, it shows the efficiency of that character but also builds up for the upcoming fights — usually bigger and bloodier scenes. We’re hooked and knowing what they’re capable of, we want to see what John or Kate will do to even more bad guys.
Except, more often than not, it falls flat. Especially with the John Wick clones that have been released this past few years. With the next scene getting more crowded, there’s a tendency to simplify the choreography. And that makes sense. In fact, it’s not necessarily a problem, but with more movies attempting to copy John Wick’s style, every flick tries to outbid the other with crazier scenes, more enemies, more guns, and so on.
To the point where — and you can definitely see that in Kate or Nobody — enemies appear just to be effortlessly dropped in a fraction of a second by the main character. Which, in my humble opinion, and after seven years of John Wick-sploitation, works against the original premise of this specific style.
Fighting, in the first John Wick, is about clean cuts, elaborate choreographies and meaningful moves. To put it simply: it’s not about the kill, but the execution. Something that movies like Kate seem to forget over the course of their intrigue. But to be fair, even John Wick sometimes falls into that trap, for instance in Chapter 2, when extras enter the frame just to be shot in the head moments later (See below). It makes for a bigger scene, for sure, but maybe not a better one, as John doesn’t seem to struggle that much. And well, we need the character to struggle, even a little bit, to get properly involved in a fight.
Being Creative
This is pretty much the other side to John Wick’s famous coins: his action style is highly efficient but not necessarily entertaining in itself. And certainly not when it’s chosen by most of our current action movies. It needs creativity to remain thrilling.
In that regard, I found the third chapter of John Wick’s adventures is vastly superior to the second one. For example, in Parabellum, John has to build a gun with antique pistol pieces before enemies arrive. He fights on a horse. He’s helped by Sofia’s (Halle Berry) dogs. In this one, you can clearly see that Chad Stahelski and his teams wanted to push the envelope: it may feel dumb or over the top, but it’s always captivating.
In Kate, the actions scenes can be beautifully shot, and some of them managed to find cool ideas (like Kate giving herself a haircut during a knife-fight) but most of them feel overseen, and from the very first viewing, at that.
Probably because they’re a bit shy. For example, the entire movie takes place in Tokyo but except for a few Samurai clichés, it could have happened in any other big city. Japan never feels like a proper place, merely a background, but I’m sure this environment could have elevated both the action and the story with a bit of care.
Then again, John Wick and most male-centered action movies are not always perfect in that regard. But if you can’t be a hundred per cent creative, you can always pay attention to details and move your characters in a meaningful way, both in the geography of a scene or in your writing.
The Way You Move
Yet, most of John Wick clones use the “tacticool” reloads and the Gun-Fu punches as an excuse to move a character from point A to point B without thinking about the stakes of a particular scene. This is clearly the case in Kate where at some point, the assassin is surrounded by a dozen of enemies in the streets of Tokyo. You can see bits from that scene in the trailer below:
The tension rises and we wonder how Kate will escape from this situation. But the tension immediately goes down when we cut from her being cornered in a little noodles restaurant to her finishing off a guy with a badass move outside of the same restaurant like nothing ever happened. And when you think about it, this is no different from the unreadable action of a Taken 3 for instance. Even if the action and the editing stay clean, when the fight ends, you don’t fully understand what the character just went through.
That said, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Mary Elizabeth Winstead screaming her lungs off in-between firefights, which is something most action movies leave out of the door, either by concentrating on physical wounds, like in Atomic Blonde or by writing a very mutic character, like Extraction’s Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth). It doesn’t sound that new, for sure, but acknowledging a character’s psychological pain is still pretty rare for this kind of action movie.
Firefights
One final observation I had about the action style introduced and popularised by John Wick is the way these movies use guns. Like every action movies buff out there, I love a good firefight and I will always look forward to a cool gearing up montage, like every time John Wick enters a Continental Hotel, for instance! Halas, with time passing and more copycats being made, just like it struggles with more fighters, the John Wick style appears to have a problem with bigger guns.
Don’t get me wrong, assault rifles and such are still pretty rare in these movies, which typically save them for their third act or one particular scene. Check Parabellum’s firefight in the Continental (featuring cartoonish bulletproof armours), for example:
But for a weird reason, when bigger and meaner weapons finally come into play, it doesn’t really feel like a step up, in the action nor the story. Wich is a shame, especially when you take a look back to the original John Wick’s introduction to assault rifles.
In the scene below, our favourite former assassin can now take on multiple targets, shoot through cover, stop vehicles, and so on and so forth. There’s a clear progression in both stakes and spectacle because of that weapon. Therefore, this scene feels like a proper firefight and not your typical John Wick duel, only with an assault rifle.
Yet, in most of John Wick’s successors, a weapon equals a weapon. And although I understand not everybody is interested in calibres, firing modes and other morbid details firearms can bring to a table, I’m pretty sure they’re able to spice up any action scene when used properly.
Here, we’re going back to our point on creativity and how a very specific element of a scene can drive the action. It’s not always about your environment or your character but also what weapons he or she is carrying. It’s something shooters and action video games do pretty well: making sure each of the tools at your disposal feels different so they can create a totally different experience from potentially similar scenes.
In that regard, Nobody was pretty creative but even the good pupil falls short of the original. Sure, RZA’s using a sniper rifle in super close combat is fun, but in 2021, it doesn’t make a scene anymore. I like these kinds of nuggets as much as the next guy but perhaps I would like John Wick’s version of a firefight like Heat’s Shoutout even more.
Like any good system, the action style developed by the John Wick franchise and its peers needs to be challenged and developed to remain relevant. I’m not saying I’m done with Gun-Fu, extravagant reloads and Hollywood’s take on tactical fighting, but after seven solid years, I would certainly appreciate more creativity and efforts to elevate these (relatively) new elements before they become overdone gimmicks. What about you? If you have anything to share, please make sure to follow me on Twitter, or leave a comment!
