Wick, Warriors, Hotline Miami and Wild Nature
The beautiful moment when your influences influence each other
Short story: John Wick 4 was great fun. Really inventive and playful, with great performances and very little downtime between the next person getting a fist/gun/knife/brick/insert item to the face. If you like the sort of comics I make, I’m pretty certain you’ll like this.
And that last point is why I’m writing this. The John Wick series has been a huge influence on what I do. So it was surreal when, in the final third of Chapter 4, it directly referenced two of the other big influences on Wild Nature: The Warriors and Hotline Miami.
Keanu and Chad Stahleski don’t know me or my work of course, but there was something beautiful seeing a shared bloodline between our work. We’ve been watching, loving and absorbing the same things, and using them to inform what we create.
Perfect timing too as I’m working on the most ambitious combat sequence I’ve drawn so far (by the way, the process post is on its way - it’s just been a little more work that I’d realised).
“Warriors, come out to play…”
The 1979 cult movie, The Warriors, is pretty unique. Grim, gritty yet utterly camp and ridiculous. I love it.
It’s one long chase movie where there’s no problem that can’t be solved by dressing up in a gaudy outfit, sneering and posing, and punching someone so hard they fly in slow-motion. Wick 4 has a lot of that in general, but it also lifts the iconic radio DJ broadcasts that force The Warriors to stay on the run, even down to a punked up version of Motown classic, Nowhere to Hide.
One of the earliest versions of Wild Nature presented The Animals in a very similar way to some of The Warriors’ gangs. They were hunting Swan through a desolate Miami, where everyone seemed to be helping them.
The story moved onto what it is now, but lots of elements stayed in it: the matches happen in the ruins of the city, for example. The hardback cover to volume 1 is a direct homage to one of The Warrior’s promo posters (a couple of images up). And the various teams all have that gang DNA in them, with their uniforms and slogans.
“Do you like hurting other people?”
And then there’s Hotline Miami. It’s a wonderfully nasty action game set in the 80s, where a man known as “Jacket” is tasked with killing a variety of mobsters while wearing a range of animal masks to a throbbing retrowave beat.
Can you see where this is going?
Not only was this game a big influence on one of the early scenes in The Grave, it’s probably the single biggest influence on Wild Nature. It even introduced me to retrowave as a genre, still the soundtrack when I’m writing. And I’ve drawn Jacket with his rooster mask.
One of Wick 4’s best action scenes is viewed top down, aping Hotline Miami’s chosen perspective, relentless momentum and black comedy. I couldn’t stop chuckling at how audacious it was, and how much it was speaking to a relatively niche audience.
It’s making me think I should try and do a crossover print. Does anyone know the guys behind HM? Let me know - I’d love to talk to them.
“Those who cling to death…”
But what did I really think about John Wick Chapter 4?
It’s really good. Some of the set pieces are absolutely beautiful and frequently hilarious (the grim, gritty tone of the original is pretty much gone). Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Scott Adkins and Donnie Yen bring delightfully camp swagger to the whole thing. If this is the last Wick, then it’s a good way to go.
Yeah, it’s too long. Nearly three hours stretches out what could be a near perfect two hour action romp. Plus, there’s too much new lore introduced to keep the plot moving and then hastily forgotten about. It’s what happens when you get a bigger budget. You go bigger.
The original movie is lean and focused. It had lots of cool ideas that suggested a bigger world, and the script was elegant at using them to elevate a pretty standard revenge story.
Chapter 2 largely got the balance right of bigger but still somewhat grounded. Chapter 3 had the weird and pointless detour to Casablanca, and that seems to have set a path for Chapter 4.
We get the detour to Berlin, which has some great moments, but is all about plot mechanics, wasting Scott Adkins (who really deserves bigger roles!)
The script increasingly feels like a tool to shoe-horn in loads of action scenes, regardless of whether they move the characters on or not. They started with a series of cool scenes rather than a character-driven narrative.
But these are gripes I don’t care about when the camera lifts up overhead, the pulsing synths start, and John Wick - as vulnerable as he is fierce - goes to work.