Ever since John Woo revolutionized the motion movie along with his 1986 triumph “A Higher Tomorrow,” critics have described his “gun-fu” choreography as balletic. It turned out that is exactly how Woo needed his bullet-whizzing sequences to be seen. An enormous fan of musicals, Woo phases these squib-popping set items as if he is directing Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, or Cyd Charisse. They’re invigorating bursts of stylish brutality that’ll go away you gasping in delight, as long as you possibly can abdomen the gratuitous bloodshed.
I’ve all the time had a really sturdy abdomen (with a number of excessive exceptions), so I’ve by no means been bothered by the unremitting violence in Woo’s motion pictures. They’re so hyper-stylized that, regardless that the flicks usually have a real-world aesthetic (this modified when he obtained to Hollywood), when the weapons begin blazing an enormous, foolish smile breaks out throughout my face. As with the climactic shootout in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” the heightened feelings expressed by god-tier actors like Chow Yun-Fats, Sally Yeh, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai are the stuff of massive opera. They’re thrilling, tragic, and cathartic in equal measure.
Nonetheless, you could be questioning the place Woo obtained the thought to have his characters two-fisting handguns, as a result of, properly, this isn’t a trope frequent to Hollywood musicals or operas. As an alternative, the deployment of this flourish was drawn from the director’s love of Westerns. However when it got here to what sort of handguns would work finest in these eventualities, the gun-ignorant Woo needed to search recommendation from his crew.
John Woo discovered both-barrels inspiration in Westerns
In an October 2025 interview with Selection, Woo acknowledged, “I would seen numerous Westerns.” When it got here to the kind of firearm his protagonist would use within the pioneering “A Higher Tomorrow,” Woo added, “[I]f he is an expert killer and he is a real hero, he would by no means use a machine gun. It is too simple and never elegant.”
Woo’s subsequent activity was choosing the precise gun for the job, which, once more, proved confounding for a person who’d by no means been a gun-owner. The movie’s weapons crew advisable Beretta 92F semiautomatics, which might, when fully-loaded and grasped in both hand, ship 30 rounds in fast succession. That is how Woo discovered that staccato rhythm that will function the percussive beat to which his gunmen would, in essence, dance. The motion itself is preposterously unrealistic, however, oh, to look at a grasp like Chow Yun-fat channel his inside, gun-slinging Kelly.
As soon as Woo’s movies started making their approach to the US (“The Killer,” which he is since remade, was the primary to make an arthouse splash), numerous administrators, most notably Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott, had their characters blasting off two handguns as a type of homage. Nineties motion cinema would’ve seemed remarkably completely different had John Woo by no means knocked the style excessive along with his Hong Kong classics.
