30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 12: That’s Certainly A Mustache (53:00-53:30)
I love this section of the fight, both for the nonchalant way they just let squib blood splatter across the perspex protecting the camera lens (happens multiple times throughout the movie) and for the way the stunt crew here works their asses off to make Keanu look like a god. On the strategy/tactics side of […]
30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 11: Bringing BJJ to a gunfight (52:30-53:00)
There are a number of “Interesting Facts About John Wick” listicles out there. (http://www.hollywood.com/movies/x-facts-you-didnt-know-about-john-wick-60646890/ served as source for me here) Among the things one learns is that Keanu Reeves had a 104 degree fever due to the flu during the shooting of the “upper floor” of the Russian Nightclub scene, which we are in the […]
30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 10: Gunplay (52:00-52:30)
Well, Iosef made it upstairs and out another door. He’s about to miss out on one of the most chaotic, innovative and interesting fight scenes ever captured on film. It is a seamless integration of gunplay, physicality from both the star and the stunt team, hand-to-hand and realism. People RELOAD THEIR WEAPONS. The second floor […]
30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 9: Dance Floor (51:30-52:00)
We’re about to get into the meat of the most iconic fight scene of this movie, the dance floor of the Red Circle. Iosef, clutching his towel and impotently waving a gun he never fires, staggers through the crowd of dancers, heading for security at the far side of the dance floor. For a moment, […]
30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 8 : Plot Armor (51:00-51:30)
This will be a shorter entry as there isn’t really a lot of fighting in this bite of the movie. John Wick has just refused to shoot Iosef through his human shield and that has delayed everything long enough for the cavalry to arrive. Just before that happens, Iosef is fleeing past a series of […]
30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 8: Masculine vs Macho 50:30-51:00
I have this saying that I think is relevant to both Keanu Reeves and John Wick, and especially relevant in THIS thirty seconds of John Wick the movie. “A masculine guy knows he is a man; a macho guy is terrified he’s NOT.” (And let me be clear I don’t feel a man is defined […]
Chapter 7: Shades of Blue and Red 50:00 – 50:30
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 […]
Prologue: Russian Nightclub 48:00-50:00
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, […]
30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 6: Slasher (31:30-32:00)
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. […]
30 Seconds of Wick Chapter 5: Cleaning the Kitchen (31:00-31:30)
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 […]