Why the martial arts style of John Wick movies and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings owed a lot to Hong Kong cinema

Fight scenes in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings paid homage to Jackie Chan-style action – ex-members of his stunt team choreographed them

In the John Wick trilogy, Keanu Reeves and the director used what they had learned training under Hong Kong choreographer Yuen Woo-ping for The Matrix films

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Simu Liu in a still from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Photo: Jasin Boland/Marvel Studios

Published: 4:15am, 27 Mar 2022

Although John Woo-style gunplay had been adopted by Hollywood in the early 1990s, it wasn’t until The Matrix trilogy that Hong Kong-style martial arts became fully integrated into mainstream films.

That was, of course, down to the film’s Hong Kong martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, who trained star Keanu Reeves, and other members of the cast, in martial arts for four months before the film began.

“The big thing about The Matrix was that the complex martial arts were not performed by martial artists,” says Keith Rainville, a martial arts commentator based in Los Angeles.

As the fight scenes were performed by the actors, they seemed more authentic. This approach has since been used with varying degrees of success in Hollywood, but a few films have stood out.

Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which Black Belt Magazine called “as good as any other martial arts film shot in cinema history”, and the violent John Wick film series have received praise from action aficionados.