A John Wick 2 Stunt Gone Wrong Cut An Entire Car In Half
The "John Wick" franchise isn't just a montage of John Woo-inspired gun-fu combat sequences. The series has used just about everything imaginable to craft intense action scenes, from dogs to, as was the case with "John Wick: Chapter 4," fast-moving vehicles. In fact, cars and other forms of transport have been utilized by franchise director Chad Stahelski throughout the four "John Wick" films, and not just to choreograph fight-scene style "car-fu" sequences.
All the way back in 2014's "John Wick," the titular hitman reluctantly returns to his former illicit lifestyle after his puppy is killed and his Ford Mustang Boss 429 stolen. That first entry in the saga of Baba Yaga saw Wick get revenge for the aforementioned pup killing, but his Mustang remained unaccounted for. Which is why, when "John Wick: Chapter 2" arrived, there was some unfinished business to take care of.
"Chapter 2" starts with John Wick breaking into Abram Tarasov's (Peter Stormare) compound to retrieve his ride. Abraham was brother of the late Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), who John Wick offed in the first movie, and found himself and his men being menaced by the unstoppable assassin in the opening moments of "Chapter 2." Naturally, Wick escapes the warehouse via some fancy stunt driving. But it turns out that driving proved beyond tricky to pull off, and in one instance actually led to a car basically being cut in half.
'Go get the second one'
Keanu Reeves is, as second unit director Darrin Prescott notes in a Vanity Fair video, "probably the best actor driver in the business." But when it came to the Mustang breakout scene, the "John Wick: Chapter 2" team brought in a professional to handle the trickier stunts, such as when Wick jumps his car sideways out of the warehouse.
Jeremy Fry was the stunt driver tasked with pulling off this maneuver. A seasoned pro who's worked on everything from the "Fast and Furious" movies to the "Bourne" series, Fry was keen to make the stunt the best it could be. He told METRO how he'd seen a stunt in the film "Big Hero 6" in which a car makes a jump and turns sideways, and mentioned this to Prescott, who gave the green light. But actually doing it proved difficult even for someone of Fry's experience.
In the director's commentary for "Chapter 2," which has also yielded such gems as the revelation that the "John Wick" creatives spent thousands of dollars on a shot of dog poop, director Chad Stahelski explained, "The first take [Fry] missed and he cut [the car] in half. It took him a little while to recover. Our stunt coordinator, Darrin Prescott, didn't miss a beat. He's just like, 'Go get the second one!'"
Fry recalled things from his perspective, telling METRO: "The door was 20 feet wide, and the car was about 18 feet long. So if I was coming out if I happen to be sideways, I only had a foot on either end at speed to get the car out the door." After basically ripping the entire front of the car off on his first try, Fry said he was physically fine but added, "Emotionally I was destroyed."
Risk vs reward
According to Jeremy Fry, it took five attempts to get the shot, but it was worth it. As he told METRO, "They played it back and it was so cool [...] For whatever reason on that shot, everything had kind of come together. It's one of the coolest shots that I've been a part of."
It's worth mentioning that it wasn't just that Fry had to jump a car sideways through a gap that was basically the same length as the vehicle, while traveling at high speed and attempting to maintain his drift after he landed. As Darrin Prescott explains in his breakdown video, there was also an "edge arm" to the right of the gap through which Fry was jumping the car. That's basically another car with a camera arm mounted on top. As Prescott said, "not only is [Fry] trying to figure out how to drift through this small space [...] he also can't slam into this [edge arm] car."
Prescott further explained how the crew and Fry pressed ahead after the disastrous first take. In the second unit director's recollection, the team actually did seven or eight takes to get the shot, with Prescott adding, "It fell into that category of risk vs reward, so we decided that the shot was going to be so cool."
The "John Wick" movies have become so popular at least in part because of the dedication of the stunt crew and Keanu Reeves himself, who does so much of his own action that some were convinced he was going to die on the set of "John Wick: Chapter 4." In that sense, it was worth pushing Fry in this instance, otherwise it just wouldn't have been in keeping with John Wick tradition.