Tu Lam, a former Special Forces soldier, rates the fighting techniques Keanu Reeves uses in the "John Wick" movies.
He talks about judo and jujitsu, sniper techniques, and the ways public missions are handled in "John Wick" (2014), with Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe, and John Leguizamo. He explains how suppressors work, the best ways to handle a knife, and how to turn anything in a room into a weapon, as seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2" (2017), with Common, Ruby Rose, and Laurence Fishburne. He compares his own experiences with urban shootouts, working with military dogs, and fighting on a motorcycle to "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum" (2019), with Halle Berry, Ian McShane, and Anjelica Huston. Finally, he breaks down defensive driving, clearing a room, and fighting on stairs in "John Wick: Chapter 4" (2023), with Bill Skarsgård and Donnie Yen.
Lam is a former Green Beret with 23 years of service. During his time in the special forces, he was deployed in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. He is also the founder and CEO of Ronin Tactics, which provides tactical hand-to-hand and weapons training to a wide array of clients. You can also see his motion-capture movements displayed in the character Ronin in "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare."
Follow Tu:
https://www.instagram.com/ronintactics/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/@ronintacticsinc
He talks about judo and jujitsu, sniper techniques, and the ways public missions are handled in "John Wick" (2014), with Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe, and John Leguizamo. He explains how suppressors work, the best ways to handle a knife, and how to turn anything in a room into a weapon, as seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2" (2017), with Common, Ruby Rose, and Laurence Fishburne. He compares his own experiences with urban shootouts, working with military dogs, and fighting on a motorcycle to "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum" (2019), with Halle Berry, Ian McShane, and Anjelica Huston. Finally, he breaks down defensive driving, clearing a room, and fighting on stairs in "John Wick: Chapter 4" (2023), with Bill Skarsgård and Donnie Yen.
Lam is a former Green Beret with 23 years of service. During his time in the special forces, he was deployed in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. He is also the founder and CEO of Ronin Tactics, which provides tactical hand-to-hand and weapons training to a wide array of clients. You can also see his motion-capture movements displayed in the character Ronin in "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare."
Follow Tu:
https://www.instagram.com/ronintactics/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/@ronintacticsinc
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FunTranscript
00:00I definitely love the way that they improvise with weapons because everything is a weapon.
00:10If I enter that antique shop, all those blades I'm going to use.
00:14Hi guys.
00:15My name is Thu Tuan Lam, former U.S. Army Special Forces Green Beret.
00:19I have 23 years in full spectrum warfare.
00:23I am the founder and CEO of Ronin Tactics.
00:26Today we're going to look at every John Wick movie and judge just how realistic they are.
00:33So if you look here on the video where it says in Latin, fortune favors the brave.
00:40If you do like a general research, it ties it back to the third Marines.
00:46And a lot of traditions within the military is to put tattoos that symbolizes the units
00:54that they came from.
01:03Keanu Reeves was trained by Aaron Butler.
01:06You could see that played out with Keanu Reeves and his training and how he's doing that type
01:11of instinctive firing.
01:13It's not that accurate.
01:14It's more of you point and shoot.
01:16Now when it comes to, is he that accurate being in the dark?
01:20John Wick, he knows his house.
01:22He knows the terrain.
01:24When you have all these guys come in and trying to flood the house, first they were coming
01:29in as singletons.
01:31They should have been moving as a team.
01:33Because they separated themselves, John Wick was able to funnel and utilize the darkness.
01:49In a close quarters gunfight, it's about angles in the room.
01:53When John Wick enters a room alone, his rear, his six o'clock is exposed.
01:59Any weapons manipulation from there is exposed.
02:03And if you look at the house, there's hallways, there's stairways, there's different levels
02:08to a room.
02:09So when you turn your back, you're exposing your back to that threat.
02:13I thought that Keon Reeds did a great job on doing the hand, the thumb over thumb method,
02:20which is the proper shooting position for the amount of speed that he was driving the
02:25gun.
02:28John Wick kind of threw his legs over and kind of took him down, almost like a triangle
02:34choke on a jiu-jitsu move, and then able to take out the other guy with a pistol.
02:41More Hollywood on that.
02:42We would never do that in real life because if I have to go down and drop my level to
02:48the ground grappling with somebody, now I lost visual and situational awareness of everything
02:53that's going on around me, which is the gunfight.
02:56Keon Reeds, he went under very intensive training from judo to jiu-jitsu to the amount of tactics
03:03he had to learn.
03:04I rate this as six out of 10.
03:07I thought the realism in his movements were there.
03:11The tactics wasn't on point when it comes to low light tactics.
03:15So he looks great and it shows in his movies.
03:25It's about surprise, speed, and violence, right?
03:28What I like about him is he's maximizing concealment, which was darkness, right?
03:34So you have two things.
03:35You have cover and you have concealment.
03:37He first stops bullets, and concealment camouflages you.
03:41The problem with that scene right there was he put his hands over the guy's mouth.
03:46Guys have lost their fingers doing that.
03:50When you hit a guy in the head, it's kind of hard because he's moving.
03:57They have body armor on.
03:59We heal them in the pelvis or the head.
04:00We do train to shoot a low percentage target, which is a headshot, and then we have high
04:05percentage targets, which is the torso and hip shots.
04:15Hand-to-hand combat happens a lot in a confined space.
04:17We enter a room, we eliminate the threat, and we have unknowns in the house.
04:24So if you don't have a weapon, you become an unknown.
04:26We're going to have to put our hands on you, and we're going to have to secure you with
04:30some kind of flex tie until we know if you're a threat or non-threat.
04:37He didn't really break fall.
04:39So if you fall like that, we actually do a judo break fall.
04:43To try to eliminate such a hard impact, we're trained how to fall based off of our hand-to-hand
04:52combat training.
04:53Now with that fall, that would take the wind out of him, but if he has body armor on, that
04:57will muffle some of the impact.
04:59I give this a six.
05:01It was very entertaining.
05:03I thought Keanu Reeves did some great things, as in maximizing darkness.
05:13The time that John Wick took down this target was not all that great.
05:18He did it during the day.
05:19Nobody wants to attack during the day because we want to maximize surprise.
05:24In this scenario, if the special forces was to take this down, we would contain and isolate
05:30around that area with snipers.
05:32So there'll be probably three sniper high position with a spotter shooter providing
05:39intelligence.
05:40We're probably going to wait until it gets darker to take down the target.
05:49During my career, I spent eight years as a sniper.
05:53We didn't use the SRS sniper rifle.
05:55The SRS sniper rifle is a bullpup design.
05:59What I saw wrong on this is based on geometry of that weapon, John Wick didn't have a proper
06:05shooting position.
06:06That means there were areas that he could arrest that weapon on to stabilize the weapon
06:11more, but he decided to go a shooting offhand.
06:15And also his shooting offhand wasn't on point because the shooting offhand we do is more
06:20like this swivel position and also we use a sling, not a stable shooting position for
06:26a sniper.
06:34During special forces, we have done sabotage type of operations.
06:38That means we'll go in, we'll put explosives on cars and we'll blow it up just to disable
06:43that ability for them to get away or reinforcements.
06:53And in the end, he came in with a pistol, made no sense because all the threats wasn't
06:58really eliminated and coming in with a pistol doesn't have the firepower you need to come
07:05in.
07:06I would have came in with definitely a assault rifle.
07:09I rate this video a five out of 10.
07:13John Wick didn't really use the capabilities of that sniper rifle.
07:23From my experience, uh, working with suppressors, it's very hard to get the pistol to be that
07:28quiet.
07:29You know, we haven't had any pistols with our suppressors that are that quiet.
07:34You could fire it without having ear protection, but it's not that quiet.
07:39People would have definitely heard that, especially in a subway station.
07:47Ultimate no-go.
07:48It's about surprise.
07:50You don't want to expose your weapon or your capability into the end.
07:54It's about angling your body.
07:56It's about putting the weapon into a certain holding position that conceals that blade,
08:02You can employ the lethality of that blade.
08:12The problem is he didn't follow up with that movement.
08:14He kicked the blade with his knees, like a Muay Thai knee, and that gives you that initial
08:20burst to get through whatever hold he's at.
08:23What the opponent did was he stuck the blade in and he pulled it back out.
08:27We don't want to do that.
08:28What he should have done was ran the blade right down his thigh.
08:39So Keanu Reeves went into a forward grip position.
08:42If you back this right here with your thumb, it gives you more force on the cut.
08:49But if I'm here in this fighting position, I'll cut your thumb off.
08:53So if I see that thumb isolated, I'm going to cut that thumb.
08:56So I thought that Keanu Reeves did a great job in wrapping that forward position.
09:01He came in with thrust and the guy blocked him.
09:03The opponent went into more of a reverse grip position.
09:08Let's say the opponent, hands in a way, allows me to come in.
09:12Let's say I come in like this, he blocks, allows me to parry, use the blade as a hook.
09:18So you can kind of see on the clip, he uses a hook to parry and he tried to come in with
09:24a stick.
09:25So the reverse grip is great, but it doesn't give you range.
09:30It gives you leverage.
09:31It gives you more power.
09:33The forward grip position, it gives me range and reach.
09:38If I was to pick two positions in the train, since it's a very close quarters environment,
09:45I would probably go reverse grip position.
09:47I thought both of the tactics were executed pretty decent in this scene.
09:55I would give it a four in realism.
10:05In Special Forces, we are trained on how to conceal our weapons.
10:09So we wrap our weapons up.
10:11We conceal our weapons, especially in these type of environments.
10:14So we don't want to definitely pull out the weapon and expose it the way they did.
10:18So to conceal a weapon is truly tradecraft.
10:23So we conceal weapons in toolboxes.
10:26I have taken a drill and concealed weapons into like a hand drill.
10:31We have been reporters.
10:33We act like reporters and we conceal weapons into the camera so we can get close.
10:40For him to get shot in the gut like that at close quarters multiple times and move on
10:46is so unrealistic.
10:47There's no way.
10:49That's a slow death when you get shot in the stomach.
10:54You're not going to be able to move.
10:55You're not going to be able to do anything but just lay there and bleed out.
10:59So for him to be able to do that, so unrealistic.
11:07Joint locks are implemented in the military.
11:10We like to control people with joint locks to take them down.
11:13So a lot of times when we implement these type of moves, it's more controlling the opponent.
11:18Is to take them down so we can put a flex tie on them so we can search them to see
11:23if they're a combatant or a non-combatant.
11:28We're trained on how to take down bigger opponents.
11:31What I do is I stick my fingers through their eyes.
11:33I hit them in the ear, mess up their equilibrium.
11:40When it comes to close quarters battle, everything is a weapon.
11:45In fact, when I travel overseas, I use a pen as a weapon.
11:49So we do use everything as a weapon.
11:53So that was realistic.
11:54Not very realistic to attack John Wick in the public.
11:57You can't control the area.
11:59So I give this scene a four out of 10.
12:09So there were certain shooting positions that I saw on John Wick.
12:14So this is called high compress.
12:16When I look at the front sight and I'm able to push it to the threat wall here.
12:22This is called a souli stance.
12:24So you're putting your weapon here and as you're moving, you can kind of see the hand
12:30rotating to the firing position.
12:32We do all these compressed positions in case I have a teammate.
12:35You don't want to point your weapon at somebody.
12:38They overexpose their hand, like overexpose the weapon position like this, which shows
12:42the weapon before your body.
12:45So a lot of times we compress the weapon.
12:47So as let's say a door, I'll compress the weapon in.
12:50I can still fire from this position and I'll move in and drive my gun into the threat area.
12:58We didn't really see that on the movie.
13:01Also you want to be able to pie.
13:03So if this is a door frame, a door frame here, I want to be able to start pieing around that
13:10door and you didn't see too much of that.
13:18The problem with that is John Wick started going on his own, right?
13:22So that doesn't allow you that two man team that you need.
13:26They should provide providing cover for each other.
13:28When they did a reload, the other person should have been suppressive fire or get a different
13:33angle on the threat.
13:35Because they split up like that, there are more singleton in the gunfight.
13:39And when you're a singleton in that gunfight, in that cityscape, you're probably not going
13:44to win.
13:45It kind of reminds me of, you know, Morocco or some of the cities I've been to in Africa.
13:51Multiple threats, multiple angles, alleyways, windows.
13:56So different levels of threats.
14:01It is common to have military dogs working beside us.
14:04So when you come in in civilian clothes, you want to lower your posture.
14:08To have a military working dog with you, it looks like a military harness that was
14:13on that dog, totally exposes your position.
14:17We bring in dogs when we do direct action operations.
14:22Yeah, in the Special Forces, we are trained on how to shoot various different heights.
14:30In fact, we go to school to learn high angle shooting.
14:34We learn to shoot in urban environments from the ground level to windows, rooftops.
14:39I rate it really a two.
14:42And the reason why is because they had a buddy team.
14:47They were moving as a buddy team.
14:49They didn't really support each other's movement.
14:51They didn't support each other's angles, reloads.
15:00We do train in throwing blades.
15:03The thing is, you've got to know your distance when throwing a blade.
15:06If you look at John Wick, he threw the blade straight or you could rotate a blade in.
15:13When you rotate a blade in, you've got to really know that distance.
15:16When you throw a blade, you lose that weapon.
15:20In this particular scene, they had multiple blades that he could get a hold of.
15:23They were throwing a Bowie knife, they were throwing these big knives, fixed blade knives.
15:29Anything can be thrown.
15:30There are throwing knives that has the geometry of the path of the throw, but as long as you
15:35know the weight and you know the distance, yeah, you can definitely throw any blade.
15:41I thought Keanu Reeves did really well on his weapons handling.
15:45I definitely love the way that they improvised with weapons because everything is a weapon.
15:51If I entered that antique shop, all those blades I'm going to use, all those axes I'm
15:56going to use.
15:57I'm going to use seven.
16:04We usually have a guy driving the motorcycle and we have a guy sitting behind him with
16:11the weapon.
16:12So, it's very hard to run a bike and be able to shoot and do all that.
16:25Weapons in the military has been used since World War II in reconnaissance type of missions.
16:31There was a certain point in my Special Forces career, especially when we started moving
16:35towards the Middle East.
16:37We needed desert mobility.
16:38Dirt bikes allow us the ability to quickly get to an area to contain and isolate if we
16:45need to put more troops on the ground, to get into areas that it's hard to get big tactical
16:52vehicles in.
16:53We are rated a four out of a ten.
16:56We train a lot on shooting off of moving vehicles and it's very difficult and it's almost impossible
17:07to control the vehicle and shoot accurately like he did.
17:16In the Special Forces, we do train on defensive driving.
17:20The vehicles that we work with are up-armored vehicles, bulletproof vehicles.
17:23So heavyweight top vehicle and that changes the tires and how you turn and how you move.
17:36In the Special Forces, we have a designated driver and we have three shooters from the
17:40passenger, left side rear, right side rear, and they're pretty locked in.
17:46With John Wick driving and moving, he's not in good stable position.
17:50He doesn't have a reflexive optic on his pistol.
17:54What that means is he has to do sight alignment to engage targets accurately at the distance,
18:00which was, you know, it seems like 15 to 20 yards on some of those shots.
18:04So not very realistic.
18:06He should have known the different pillars of a car.
18:13So there are certain areas where they can stop bullets in a car.
18:16You have your different pillars, A, B, C pillars.
18:20You have your engine blocks.
18:21You have your rear axle.
18:22So those are the points that I would move to, to provide me cover from getting fired
18:29from the different angles and the points.
18:32So he didn't maximize cover in any of those moves.
18:36He actually just went around the car and started shooting the bad guys.
18:38I'll give it a two.
18:39And he was in a city in the middle of the street, which, man, you have a lot of threats
18:45at different angles.
18:46So you want to get off that X.
18:47And he didn't do that.
18:48He fought on the X.
18:49First battle, rounds do go through wall.
18:58He didn't really maximize cover.
19:00You know, he went behind walls that bullets will go through.
19:04So you want to start picking out angles in the house that will provide you cover.
19:17To clear a room is to dominate the room by going to points of domination.
19:22We like to control the room by putting players in certain control points in the room.
19:27We provide interlocking fire when we go to these points of domination.
19:30That means if I have five assaulters in the room, we're interlocking fire into the kill
19:35zone.
19:36So if you're staying in the center of that kill zone, there's no chance you're going
19:38to live.
19:39You know, I wouldn't clear it like John would clear it.
19:42He didn't pie.
19:43I didn't see him take out the corners in the room.
19:51And he ran center of the room.
19:53When you run center of the room, you start swinging your weapon.
19:55You're not maximizing cover and utilizing the walls.
20:00So when you enter that room, you go start in the center and you start swinging around.
20:04That's not the tactics we want.
20:09What you see in this particular clip is the dragon's breath.
20:13And although it's real, it has to be custom made and is really illegal in a lot of states.
20:18Being in John Wick's situation, he's a singleton coming in to multiple gunfights, different
20:23angles.
20:24You're going to have to get into some of those positions to drop your level, to get the round
20:29cover.
20:30So if you look at this stairway, it's a funnel point and it doesn't allow them the upper
20:40leg position they need.
20:41That means that are constantly having to fight to a superior position.
20:45The bad guys being on the high ground, they got superior position.
20:50You're in the worst position because you're in a fatal funnel fighting to gain terrain
20:55that the enemy has.
20:58These type of scenarios didn't play out very well in past battles.
21:02We would never attack a stairwell like this, especially when there's different avenues
21:07to get in.
21:14If I fell down those stairs, I wouldn't get up, right?
21:17So for any normal person that falls down those flight of stairs, you're probably out of the fight.
21:27We would have put sharpshooters or snipers out in containment isolation around those
21:37stairs to allow people to move up.
21:39That unknown guy, he should have been in a stagnant position, in a support by fire position
21:45to allow John Wick and Kane to move up those stairs.
21:49That would not be a good gun to use as backup because first, it's a fixed site.
21:54If you look on there, there's no optic on there.
21:56There's no lasers.
21:57There's nothing that gives him that nighttime capability.
22:00You want a high round count weapon here.
22:05So you want some kind of machine gun or you want some kind of assault rifle.
22:18This character Kane in this clip is played by Donnie Yen, who's a very popular martial
22:24artist throughout the world.
22:25There's better ways to get out of that choke hold than to employ a pencil and hit him in
22:31the hand.
22:32If somebody chokes you, right, they basically invested one hand into holding you down.
22:38So they only have one hand here.
22:40So you still have both your hands.
22:42You still have both your hands.
22:43So if I'm getting choked and I have both my hands, I can either break away from that grip,
22:49which is an easy move, or I can strike in the throat, in the eyes.
22:52I can hit them in the equilibrium areas and mess them up.
22:55I give it a four.
22:56My favorite John Wick scene was when he went into that antique shop and he was throwing
23:01all those blades.
23:02And the reason why is because when you get into a fight, it's about grabbing what's around
23:09you and using it as a weapon.
23:11I thought that was displayed very well in that scene.
23:13Thanks for watching.
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