“No wife, no dog, no home. You have nothing, John. Vengeance is all you have left.”
by Edward Gross
You could count me in as one of the most excited members of the audience as the conclusion of Avengers: Endgame played out back in 2019, with heroes “blipped” out of existence suddenly returning and instantly joining ranks with those who had remained behind to combat the tyranny of the mad titan, Thanos, and his army. All told, one of the great moments in movie history which played out as though a comic book had exploded to life in our collective minds and played out in ways we never could have imagined even in our most dream-filled days. Yet, with all of that—and the accompanying screaming and applause that greeted its every spectacle-filled moment—it still wasn’t the most visceral movie moment I’ve ever experienced. Not by a long shot.
For as long as I’ve been going to movies (and I’ve seen a lot of them over the past half-century or so), and for as easily as I’ve been swept up in spectacle, at the same time I’ve held firm in my belief that all the effects in the world cannot compare to a well-choreographed and edited fight sequence between two people who are beating the living shit out of each other, using anything at their disposal to get the job done. Consider the sequence from the second James Bond movie, 1963’s From Russia with Love, in which Sean Connery’s 007 and Robert Shaw’s Red Grant explode into violent action against each other in a tiny compartment on the Orient Express.
Join me as I jump ahead to June 1979. I’m sitting in a crowded theater in East Hampton, New York, watching Rocky II for the first time. Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa is in the ring for a rematch with Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed. Brutal round after brutal round culminates with both boxers hitting the canvas, the one getting to their feet first to be named heavyweight champion of the world. Let me tell you, that theater was filled with people (my nineteen-year-old self included) on their feet, screaming the words “Get up! Get up!” as though we were attending a real boxing match and Rocky would find his renewed vigor by our shouted words of encouragement to get back up on his feet rather than it just being Hollywood doing its thing.
Now you can write this off as being symbolic of a more innocent time, but the reality is that that combination of choreography and editing—and it didn’t matter that in reality no fight has ever seen that many blows thrown over the course of 12 rounds—was responsible for bringing the audience to the state it was in.
Moving along to 1987, it’s the introduction of cops Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon, which brought a whole new energy level to the action genre as the two of them—despite Riggs’s suicidal tendencies (or maybe because of them?)—take on a drug cartel. The following year, it was Bruce Willis as cop John McClane, finding himself going up against the invading forces of Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard and some of the sloppiest, most street-level fights you’ve ever seen, which, combined with Lethal Weapon, marked a fork in the road in the action film.
And it’s only gone on from there with genre films produced in America, Hong Kong, North Korea, and elsewhere, all influencing each other, frequently distilling their best elements and adding new ones, ultimately culminating in the conception and arrival of John Wick in 2014. The truth is, nothing could have prepared us for this melding of actor Keanu Reeves and assassin John Wick, which instantly elevated action films to a whole new level and, in turn, triggered a wave of followers attempting to capture that particular brand of magic.
But watching the first three chapters in Wicks’s journey—and the brutal gun fu and fisticuffs that are such an important part of them—and shockingly seeing how much of Reeves himself is an integral part of those action sequences and that there is little in the way of stuntmen seen, has proven itself to be the proverbial breath of fresh air to a genre that’s as old as cinema itself and renewed my own passion for the action film. In a sense, they’ve brought me right back to being a kid, watching Bond and Grant duking it out on the Orient Express, anticipation growing for what the next fight will be and who will throw the first—and last—punch.
Edward Gross
October 2021