It’s a Wild & Wooly, Western, WuXia, Samurai Tour de Force Epic

by Dr. Craig D. Reid

John Wick is at a boiling point. Feel it!

Hands up, down and sideways, the best American martial arts movie in 2023 is John Wick: Chapter 4 (JW4) as he returns under more attritional circumstances. Turn on the end of the 2023 Saturday night floodlights for all to see, it is a film where its very essence of what it is, how it is, and where it can take us into 2024, where it might just mute all other martial art films next year.

Yet these are the martial arts movie moments in history we search for, as JW4 is reflecting its sheer utter dominance, a rare acquaintance in our genre where it’s a heavy weight of nuts and bolts that hopefully can inspire other American made martial arts filmmakers prowl to do better. It’s no easy task, here is what filmmakers are up against. (Maybe only JW5 can ascend beyond?)

In JW4, Wick (Keanu Reeves) is transformed, reimbued with fervent ambition, believing he has a way out of the High Table, the secretive and powerful organization that governs and controls the underground world of assassins. It serves as a council of high-ranking individuals who enforce a strict code of conduct within the assassin community. Wick’s margin of error has vanished, it all comes down to one night, it is non-negotiable.

One more moment to cease, one more moment to nettle, to grasp. As he scrambles for what’s left of his reputation and preserve his dominance against the world’s assassins who pledge their blind allegiance to the blackmailing, irreverent leader Marquis de Gramont, from Wicks perspective does he have the guts to face the ferocious frenzied prejudice of this pseudo-Monarch? Oh yeah!

The whole organizational concept of the Wick films is influence by the secret world of Jiang Hu that is so beautifully and surreptitiously the backbone of Chinese wuxia novels and films.

Jiang Hu is an alternative society made up of beggars, martial art heroes, villains and outcasts who coexisted within normal society yet lived by their own laws, systems of brotherhood and a morality code of ethics. Wu Lin became a strict martial artists subdivision of the Jiang Hu underworld that adhered to their own unwritten and respected ethical codes of righteousness, loyalty, chivalry, and gallantry.

If I was to guess which wuxia novel director Chad Stahelski’s Wick character was influenced by, whether knowingly or unwittingly, especially in JW4, I would pick Louis Cha’s (aka Jin Yong) novel, Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, and that part of Wick is greatly based on Qiao Feng, the leader of the Beggar Clan within Wu Lin. It’s worth noting Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King role and Wick supporter, sometimes projects an image of an authoritative vagrant beggar.

During dastardly and deranged exigent circumstances, Wick and Qiao are marked as public enemy number one where everybody within their respective underground societies is told to assassinate the two antiheroes at all costs.

In JW4, Stahelski’s dynamic blending has crafted an action film that transcends boundaries, while captivating audiences with its breathtaking visuals, masterful choreography and are true homages to the mixture of genres he has embraced, such as the powerful action vibes of Wuxia, Samurai and Westerns cinema as well as the sensibilities of anime, manga and graphic novels.

The Mad World of John Wick 4’s Wick-ipedia of Action

Stahelski’s thrilling floods of raw ambition and action maturity uses his brain to train, his heart to impart the incorporation of whatever his eyes and ears, feelings and emotions, and body and mind can conjure up. He’s done what in 1993 Jackie Chan told me on the set of Drunken Master II, “Make the choreography as difficult as you can,” and during the same trip the father of wire fu, Ching Siu-tung, advised, “Dream up whatever you want to do, then figure out how to do it.”

With the clutches of a renaissance man, Stahelski has firmly grasped both of these valuable pieces of fight choreography approaches to the nth degree and created his own luxurious martial art world of reality.

Shot in 2021, in JW4, still fresh after a movie that breathes familiar territory, Donnie Yen had completed a film donned in a 65-pound fat suit, doing an homage remake of Sammo Hung's 1978 film of the same name, Enter the Fat Dragon (2020), to now play the blind assassin Caine.

Not only did fans wrongly assume that Caine was influenced by his scene-stealing appearance as a blind warrior monk in Rogue One (2016) but he also ran into a similar fat-suited character, Killa, which is also an homage to Sammo, played by the English martial arts star Scott Adkins who was born a mere 100 miles north from my hometown birthplace, Reading, England.

David Carradine’s Caine persona’s influence in the Kung Fu TV show is cemented in JW4 when Wick becomes a member of sponsoring assassin sect by receiving forearm body art in the same fashion Caine did when he left the Shaolin Temple.

During the opening samurai genre influenced fray of frantic ferocity at the Continental Hotel in Osaka, Japan, the die is cast as the hotel keeper and close friend of Wick, Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada), comes face-to-face with the Marquis’ discontent for the Japanese traditions of bushido, as Marquis’ right hand liquidator Chidi (Marko Zaror) arrives and refuses to hand over his gun.

The gauntlet torn down, the lung-busting fight is magnificently tense and with every passing second it’s cranked up, industrial, intricate, it’s escapism. Chidi chides Shimazu by refusing to honorably fight with swords as his Marquis marauders arrive dressed in black armor totting firearms while wearing what looks like kabuki masks, symbolizing they’ll shut down Shimazu’s show and coat the set with the blood of Wick’s brethren.

Or maybe the masks are a symbolic nod to the origin of the first assassin organization in history, the Hashshashin of Persia created by Hasan-I Sabbah between A.D. 1090-1275.

Either way, it’s sign of things to come as mostly Keanu, Donnie and Zaror flex their martial art muscle and weaponry wares that we can guess will climax on the one night, which little did we know would be a 45-minute action paradise, and an extravaganza worthy of an Oscar.

Bravo on Wick’s nunchaku fight looking nothing like no other nunchaku fight I’ve seen and doesn’t try to emulate Bruce Lee or people who flail their weapon at lightning speed doing fancy movements that in the paraphrased words of MacBeth, “Have sound and fury, yet signify nothing and is heard no more.” However, we will be hearing about John Wick for decades to come.

The final act of JW4 is the one night mayhem of death-defying extravagant outrageousness, a rowdy riotous environment in Paris, full of colossal collisions, gut-wrenching fearing and thumping, a veritable landslide of goosebump rolling, and a heavenly Sergio Leone climax ending with someone being thrown under a triple decker bus.

Hats off to Vincent Bouillon, Keanu’s stunt double who has become the ultimate “roll” model when doing a falling downstairs stunt. With the gall and guts of a mighty Spartan warrior, he pulled of a different kind of 300.

The camera choreography of each fight/action scene is Wickedly mesmerizing, Stahelski doing the usual wide-angle shots so you can see everything and keeping the camera rolling as to draw you into the action. Yet there is one sequence he’s never done before, where he was inspired by the look of video games and anime.

It is a bird’s-eye POV oner using a camera that shoots wider angles than normal, as it tracks Wick with mostly a shotgun using dragon breath shells that lights the enemy on fire (great lighting effect), walking and shooting around the first floor of an ornate building with large multi-interconnected rooms.

Since it’s an elongated moving overhead shot, they could only light from the side, because any elevated lights could look like many crisscrossing spotlights and make the scene dizzying. Watch it carefully. How many Texas Switches did you see? I saw two and maybe a third.

Throughout JW4, you’re always waiting for something calamitous to happen as Wick pinches victories from defeat. Stahelski’s undulatingly unique approach to ballistic ballet and car combat congas is more insane than being attacked by killer hornets.

His incisive action is always seeking the master strike during each fight scene, where ironically, every shot, scenario, choreography idea and his multi-levels of fu-n (kung fu, sword fu (jian and katana), gun fu, car fu, wire fu and dare I say stunt fu) are all jollified snap, crackle, and pop master strikes in his chorographical mapping of pure golden magic and reality.

Who is going to step up in 2024 to top this? Perhaps the key is in further understanding wuxia novels and the library of wuxia martial arts films that have been influenced by these books.