Before the Hong Kong filmmaker entered the scene, movies involving gunfights were rather static: in one scene they showed the shooter aiming and firing, and in another the victim falling to the ground. Everything changed with the movie A Better Tomorrow (1986) and specifically with a sequence in which a character draws his sword like a drawn sword in one scene and in another shoots while the victim flies through the air, releasing a good amount of blood along the way. The latter in the same frame, which gave an unprecedented dynamism to the use of firearms in the cinema, turned the shots into explosions, the impacts of the bullets into very powerful blows and added a good dose of pain with the spill of the liquid vital crimson This is not gun-fu, but an evolution to more stylized firefights that would become vital to the decisive move.
This one came in Hard Boiled (1992), a film in which the filmmaker incorporated elements of the waixa. This is a narrative style with ancient origins that often involves swordsmen in all kinds of missions, with elegant weapons that move as if they were part of their own bodies and with abilities that involve the breaking of physical barriers. The latest example would be The tiger and the dragon (2000). It is also, a style that exalts beauty within violence, which in this particular film is achieved with the hero defending a baby during a shootout and whose small face ends up covered in blood at the carnage that surrounds him.
The gun-fu to conquer the world
The films mentioned above are classics in every sense of the word, but few would dare to claim that their popularity is global. For this reason, it is often said that gun-fu was presented to the entire world with Matrix (1999) that, endowed with martial arts and firearms, the breaking of physical laws from the bases of technological simulation, some of the most iconic pictures of modern cinema, and a lot, a lot of blood, exhibited all the properties of the subgenre .
If it is not associated so much it is because its sci-fi nature does not fit with the urban tint that characterizes the bulk of these works. Something that can be better appreciated in titles such as balance (2002), SE busca (2008), kick-ass (2010), Kingsman (2014) and Atomic (2017), to name a few. But if there is a film that has become the reference par excellence, it is John Wick, with the titular character played by Keanu Reeves in an eternal search for revenge within an underworld of assassins. His weapons are more than that, they are a part of his body that he left out of love and only took back when the hostility surrounding his very existence forced him to do so. There is no redemption or rest, for these can only be achieved with victory or death.
The tradition continues with Bullet trainwhich starred Brad Pitt in the role of the killer codenamed Ladybug, evolves the technique by transferring the fighting to the interior of a moving train. Narrow spaces that forced the actors to be inspired by Jackie Chan’s combat style with short but fast and powerful blows in order to cause the most damage to the opponent in the midst of spatial limitations. To this is added John Wick: Chapter 4 with the titular assassin continuing his bloody hunt in what will presumably be his penultimate installment. The good news is that the franchise will continue with ballerinawith Ana de Armas as the lethal ballet dancer introduced in parabellum (2019), who has been trained to turn dance into the deadliest of arts.
The passion for gun-fu
There are other key reasons why gun-fu tends to arouse such passion among audiences. The first and easiest to understand is the popularity of action movies that allow all kinds of unlikely adventures to be experienced from the comfort of the screen. In this case, in addition, the emotions are favored by the great dynamism of the subgenre that adds movement, speed and therefore a high dose of adrenaline.
More complex is his recurring use of proven tropes that tend to generate very specific feelings in the public. The most recurrent is the one-man army that involves a lone hero coming out ahead in a fight against countless enemies and that makes us dream of the possibility that we ourselves are that someone who faces a world of adversity in order to achieve a better world. It is not the only one, since there are also titles that have used the badass and the child in which a person of a brutal nature protects innocence at the cost of his own life. The already mentioned Hard-Boiled gave some indications of it with the aforementioned baby; John Wick distorted it when the antihero fails to protect his dog from death.
Finally, its aesthetic beauty. The human being has proven to be a violent species, but for this reason he does not enjoy the images of blood, death and destruction that this implies.. Gun-fu revolutionizes the premise when it garnishes attack and death with refined stances, strips away the old vulgarity of the pistol to make it an elegant weapon, and endows blood with an artistic quality, as if from the living of a painting. will try In this way, it has contributed to the fact that a genre that has been neglected for years, such as action, has become something as distinguished as it is popular.