10 Most Amazing Practical Movie Effects Of The 2010s

9. Gun-Fu (John Wick)

John Wick 2014 Gun-Fu Club Scene
Summit Entertainment

So many action films come and go (most of them starring Nic Cage) without leaving an impact or spawning a sequel, but the excellent action scenes in John Wick (and its sequel) helped elevate it above similar fare.

Why are they so memorable? Besides being shot in (mostly) longer takes - so you can clearly see everything that's going on - directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski decided to choreograph these scenes by using the art of "gun-fu" as a foundation.

Originated by John Woo in the mid-to-late 1980s, gun-fu is a fighting style that combines fast-paced martial arts with firearms, to create a fluid, seamless succession of close-quarters gunplay encounters.

This gives John Wick's gunfights the brutality of a hand-to-hand brawl as well as the more showy, explosive nature of a traditional shootout.

Gun-fu is by no means exclusive to John Wick, but the longer takes, the lack of CGI (which movies like Kingsman cover their gun-fu scenes in) the fact that Keanu Reeves doesn't need a stunt double, the R-rating allowing for a more bloody depiction of the style, and the lack of shaky-cam, all combine to make these action scenes some of the most impressive you'll ever see onscreen.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!