The smash-hit hitman movie series has had plenty of memorable fights, and these are the five most legendary ones (with an honourable mention).
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a man who once had a killer job — as a member of a secret society of hitmen. Brought out of retirement when his late wife’s puppy is killed, the ‘Baba Yaga’ has embarked on a quest for vengeance (and survival) over four blood-soaked films. He also makes an appearance in the latest John Wick spin-off, Ballerina (watch it on KrisWorld), starring Ana de Armas as a fellow assassin. Here are his top five action sequences in no particular order, with an honourable mention.
Honourable Mention: John’s Showdown With Eve (Ballerina)
John is sent to Hallstatt, a lakeside town in Austria, to eliminate Eve Macarro (De Armas), the eponymous ballerina-assassin at the film’s climax. Will John’s experience beat Eve’s youth?
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In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, she describes Reeves as “a pro” and “the best”, but “so generous too”. “When he goes to set and knows you’re trying to figure it out, he gives you your time, steps back, and never imposes anything. And then when you’re ready, he’s just: ‘I’m coming for you.’”
Reeves, on his part, was full of praise for his co-star, whom he had worked with on the thriller Knock Knock (2015). While the 61-year-old referred to himself as the “salty veteran” in a featurette, he felt De Armas, 37, was up to the task of holding her own against the legend. “When someone says, ‘action’, she’s like ‘Let’s go!’,” says Reeves.
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The world of John Wick expands with Ballerina, as Ana de Armas stars as an assassin trained in the traditions of the Ruska Roma.
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5) The Catacombs Gunfight (John Wick: Chapter 2)
John heads to Rome to assassinate a target. After completing the job, he is double-crossed and has to flee a hit squad through the nearby catacombs. This time, the Baba Yaga is armed with not just his Glock 38 sidearm, but also an AR-15 rifle and Benelli M4 shotgun.
“Cars, guns, knives … just basic stuff. Yeah, I know how to make an omelette, right?” Reeves quips in a featurette on his skill set as a stunt performer. For this sophomore outing, director Chad Stahelski brought in the best instructors — shooting champion Taran Butler and Jiujitsu experts the Machado brothers — to level up Reeves’ combat proficiency.
The catacomb sequence was shot in the Baths of Caracalla, a 2,000-year-old Roman bathhouse. Stahelski tells Filmmaker Magazine that he was allowed to bring in 100 stuntmen. When he asked the lady in charge of the facility if he could shoot people down there, she said, “Oh, sure.”
“And I said, ‘Really? Stunt guys are going to be hitting the walls.’ And she smacked the wall and said, ‘They’ve been here 2,000 years. Don’t worry about it.’”
4) Nightclub Shootout (John Wick)
In this iconic set piece from the first movie, John is on the hunt for Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the leader of the gang that killed his puppy. From the steamy bathhouse in the bowels of the Red Circle Club, John pursues Iosef onto the neon-drenched dance floor, while demonstrating his gun-handling and hand-to-hand combat skills in fending off the Russian gangster’s minions.
We are also introduced to the titular character’s trademark ‘magazine flip’, a reloading technique Reeves created, which has since been adopted by real-life competition shooters.
According to Stahelski’s commentary, Reeves was not just battling goons in this iconic scene from the first movie, but also a 40-degree Celsius fever. “You couldn’t even get him to sit down. He just did take after take,” adds Stahelski, who was Reeve’s former stunt double in The Matrix franchise. The scene was shot over two days.
3) Horse Stable Fight and Street Chase (John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum)
Director Stahelski shared in a Den of Geek interview that while talking to Reeves about ideas for this third instalment, one of the sequences he wrote down included a horse. Reeves confirmed he could ride a horse and pitched the idea of fighting in a stable.
The fight scene, shot in a Central Park stable, extends into a chase through Brooklyn, with motorcycle riders pursuing John on horseback. A chariot followed Reeves that could be positioned on either side of his horse out of frame to catch the actor if he fell.
“Riding a horse was too easy for Reeves, so we had him do trick riding,” Stahelski says in a featurette. Reeves relished the challenge, saying: “Chad was like, ‘Time to train on a horse’, and I was like, ‘Yes!’”
After killing a member of the shadowy international assassins' guild, the High Table, John Wick is excommunicado, but the world's most ruthless hit men and women await his every turn.
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2) The Stair Climb (John Wick: Chapter 4)
At the climax of the fourth instalment, John is racing to meet the deadline for a duel. After running a gauntlet of baddies throughout Paris, he faces the home stretch and his final challenge: the famous steps of Sacré-Cœur and another army of goons. But this time, he has his blind buddy Caine (Donnie Yen) to help him out.
“There’s actually about 302 steps, I believe, but we use 222 of them,” says Stahelski in a Vanity Fair video. He lit the staircase in the same way William Friedkin did another flight of stairs in The Exorcist, and used “baby pieces of foam strips” to pad the stair edges for the stuntmen.
“I think we did over 72 stair falls between the 20 stuntmen in the sequence. So every time a guy falls down … he’ll run all the way back around and come down to die again. And what you don’t see behind the camera are these two poor wardrobe people that are handing them hats on the way by.”
1) The Literal Dog Fight (John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum)
From gun fu, to horse fu, to dog fu — in the third instalment, John and old friend Sofia Al-Azwar (Halle Berry) meet Berrada (Jerome Flynn), the latter’s former boss, in Casablanca. When Berrada shoots one of Sofia’s two trained Belgian Malinois (don’t worry, the hound survives), our four heroes have to fight their way out of Berrada’s henchmen-filled kasbah.
To prepare for the role, Berry had to train with the five stunt dogs three hours a day, four days a week, for over eight months. “It was a real relationship that was built. I could command them just like the trainers could,” says Berry, who has two pooches herself.
The production team had to acclimate the dogs to Morocco’s sweltering heat for five weeks before shooting, and do a cat sweep before every shoot to get stray cats, which might distract the dogs, off the set.
“They are ferocious-looking, and they’re doing some amazing stunts, but they’re also really sweet,” says Berry of her canine bodyguards.
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