The Video Game That Inspired John Wick's Epic Top-Down Shot [Exclusive]
This post contains spoilers for "John Wick: Chapter 4."
"John Wick: Chapter 4" feels like the climax of everything the franchise has done until this point. It is the biggest, boldest, loudest, and most badass film in the tetralogy, and one of the most impressive American action movies since "Mad Max: Fury Road." The movie combines enough plot and set pieces that could have fit a fourth and a fifth movie into a single three-hour film that never really feels like three hours.
Indeed, this is a film that contains some of the most badass action scenes and stunts in modern film. As our own Jacob Hall said in his review out of SXSW, this film is "staged with such bravura skill and visual wit that it exposes the vast majority of American action direction as the lazy sham it is." In a movie packed to the rim with incredible set pieces, one of the standout sequences is one that acknowledges once and for all that "John Wick," while perhaps the greatest modern action franchise, has always been a bit of a videogame.
In the last hour of the film, Wick is on the run from every single assassin in the city of Paris (there are a lot, as you can imagine) and makes it to an abandoned building where he kills just a whole bunch of people. Then, once inside, the camera lifts up above John's head and looks down, presenting the extended sequence to resemble a long take, shot top-down.
The combination of the camera angle and the long uninterrupted (but not exactly) take makes for a sequence that can only be described as the live-action adaptation of "Hotline Miami" we didn't know we needed. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that video games played a key role in inspiring this particular sequence.
When video games become cinema
Our own Vanessa Armstrong talked to "John Wick: Chapter 4" director Chad Stahelski about the making of this sequence, and he does not hide the fact that he was very much influenced by video games in crafting it. "I had seen this video game and I'll throw a shout-out," he said. "I think it was called 'Hong Kong Massacre' — they did this top shot and we had been doing so much with the big muzzle flashes and it just kind of clicked."
"Hong Kong Massacre" is essentially "Hard Boiled" turned into a video game. It wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve, presenting a top-down shooter with lots of slow-motion, flying doves, and sleek acrobatics, basically everything you'd want in a John Woo video game — it even deals with a tale of vengeance between cops and robbers, and features lots of neon signs in the pouring rain.
While top-down shooters have been popular in the indie gaming space for a while, their visuals are seldom translated to live-action cinema. According to Stahelski, there is a reason for it. "No one does top shots because you look at the ground and it's not very interesting," the director explained. "[They] were never very cool with us, with lighting or choreography, because it gets old quick." But the team eventually found a way to translate the video game style to live-action by focusing on some key visuals, particularly muzzle flash lines that draw a "etch a sketch" effect, according to Stahelski.
While many movies have borrowed from video games in the past, like "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," they tend to borrow broader and more generic visuals from games, like just 8-bit art. But "John Wick" manages to actually capture a top-down level practically verbatim.
Top-down carnage
Of course, one can't simply talk about top-down action games without mentioning the indie sensation "Hotline Miami," the hyper-violent game with the kick-ass soundtrack and cool animal masks that grant you different abilities. For years, Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive" was considered to be the closest we could get to a live-action version of the game, given its rad soundtrack, knack for violence, and cool costumes — but now "John Wick: Chapter 4" has changed the game.
The top-down scene where John Wick kills a bunch of assassins in a Parisian building just rules, because it shows Stahelski is capable of borrowing specific choices from video games that we don't normally see in film. "Chapter 4" may run nearly three hours long, but it'll be the fastest three hours you ever spend in a theater.
Indeed, it is not just that the scene feels like a video game, but that it feels specifically like a game like "Hotline Miami" where you die stupidly easily, which ramps up the tension. Even though, at this point in the franchise, John Wick is essentially a superhero, one whose jacket is more bulletproof than Batman's suit or Supeman's skin, the scene still makes you think he could be at least shot and hurt. And hey, the soundtrack is great, but I'm sure the scene will inspire tons of fan edits with the "Hotline Miami" soundtrack added in when the film drops on digital.