John Wick

John Wick's directors came out of stunt work and have been explicit that the film is an answer to Hong Kong action cinema, and Hard Boiled is the peak of the style they were answering: gunplay choreographed and shot like dance, in long takes, with the camera moving with the performer rather than cutting around him. The specific inheritance is legibility. Woo holds the frame wide enough to see the whole body and the whole room, so the audience can follow who is where; John Wick does the same, against an American action convention of fast cutting and close framing that had made the geography unreadable. The gun-handling grammar, reloads included, comes from the same lineage.

The Raid reset what Western action cinema was expected to deliver, and John Wick is the American answer, made by two former stunt coordinators who took over the direction. The shared method is performer-first: choreography rehearsed as a routine and shot in long takes, wide enough to show the whole body, so the audience can read who is doing what to whom. Both films also treat the fight as the content rather than as punctuation between plot. The confined vertical building is The Raid's own structure and John Wick does not copy it; what it takes is the camera's discipline and the refusal to cut the action into illegibility.