The Russian Nightclub is the iconic fight of the Wick movies. Not my favourite—that belongs to my lethal lady Perkins—but there isn’t really any way to describe how instant the impact of this section of the movie was. It’s a seamless integration of gun, knife and hand combat, shot in a kinetic, grounded way. It […]

The Russian Nightclub “fight scene” in John Wick became almost instantly one of the greatest set pieces ever put on film. It’s the ultimate expression of what “Gun-Fu” should be. (Gun-Fu is a term from the Christian Bale movie Equilibrium that posits a kind of close combat martial art with hand guns involving an instantaneous, […]

Apologies on the missed week — my world kinda exploded and I was just working on getting one foot in front of the other. I’ll be posting three separate entries this week, this one, a “prologue” to the Russian Bathhouse fight and then the first entry of that altercation I wanted to break down what […]

This is the last segment of the Siege of Casa Wick, the first fight of the movie. And it’s the least dynamic, least athletic and most interesting bit of the fight. Because it’s here, in this moment, the audience first sees exactly what kind of movie John Wick is. It’s only superficially an action film. […]

Our current sequence begins as John Wick shoulder throws the opponent he was grappling with onto the kitchen counter. He uses a variation of the shoulder throw we’ve seen before and will see again but this time he actually flips the opponent up over his head, from his right to his left to land him […]

I think I’m going to alter the format here just a bit — rather than giving specific time markers I’m going to mark the beginning of each segment with the times and leave it there.  This section is 30:30 – 31:00. This is another favored sequence, with two cinematically beautiful moments. John is waiting at […]