An absurd yet brilliant action genre from 80s Hong Kong cinema made way for John Wick to revive the Hollywood action genre.

The very first John Wick movie came as a breath of fresh air during a time when action films were becoming increasingly unimaginative. Many agree that the movie totally saved the Hollywood action genre when it was released in 2014. The movie brought the reserved and confident presence of Keanu Reeves to a stripped-down plot, and enamored audiences with a new and elaborate action style. Yes, John Wick went through hordes of mercenaries like in a video game. However, the sense of technical proficiency with which the character treated his guns gave a special thrill to movie-goers.

It instantly made lifelong fans among cinephiles and was dubbed a cult classic just a week after its release. The pieces that went into this reinvention of the Hollywood action genre were a chain of influences that started with the gory crime flicks of Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo, and ended with Chad Stahelski, the stuntman-turned-director who helmed the movie. Underlying this major cinematic cultural exchange was an absurdly brilliant genre of action known as Gun Fu.

Birth in Hong Kong Crime Action Flicks

The birth of Gun Fu is widely attributed to one single filmmaker — John Woo. Hailing from Hong Kong, he found his start in the 70s within the same filmmaking industry that gave rise to Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, even working with the latter on some films. Woo began his filmmaking journey with kung fu movies, which were basically the Westerns of Chinese cinema, minus the traditional shootouts. In popularity and abundance, they rivaled that of Western movies in America, but they were an insulated genre of action with vast stylistic differences. Guns were little more than props in kung fu movies, and the action was based on elaborate hand-to-hand combat sequences that bordered on graceful.

Meanwhile, gunfights were the bread-and-butter of action in Hollywood cinema. Western films basically set the original standard for shootouts in Hollywood films. These films also posed a far different set of values in the action hero. Gunfights in the cinematic Wild West often gave the best advantage to the quickest draw, and their heroes were often the most prodigal in this skill. This meant that action in Hollywood films was relatively stationary; there were no chaotic brawls that had characters scuffling all over the screen.

Working in the Hong Kong film industry, John Woo was equally impressed with the dance-like acrobatics of kung fu as he was with the Mexican standoffs of cowboy Westerns. Later in the 80s, he began to conceptualize a whole new style of action films that sought to marry Western gunfights with the cinematic conventions of his own genre. The result was a gory, high-octane style of action cinema that came to be known as heroic bloodshed films.

In making these films, Woo basically combined the intense physicality of kung fu with the gratuitous gunfights of the Western. Heroic bloodshed films were set in a world of crime, with protagonists who were either cops or criminal enforcers themselves. They would often walk into the enemy’s lair with guns blazing, and these battles would regularly end up in close quarters with more guns firing than you could count. The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, and Hard Boiled were some of the important titles that saw the development of this new genre of action. Hard Boiled even featured probably the earliest form of the hallway fight — years before The Raid.