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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TechTranscript
00:00 [gunshots]
00:02 I definitely love the way that they improvise with weapons
00:08 because everything is a weapon.
00:10 If I enter that antique shop,
00:12 all those blades I'm gonna use.
00:14 Hi guys, my name is Tew Twine Lamb,
00:16 former US Army Special Forces Green Beret.
00:19 I have 23 years in full spectrum warfare.
00:23 I am the founder and CEO of Ronin Tactics.
00:26 Today, we're gonna look at every John Wick movie
00:29 and judge just how realistic they are.
00:31 So if you look here on the video where it says,
00:37 in Latin, "Fortune favors the brave,"
00:40 if you do like a general research,
00:42 it ties it back to the third Marines.
00:45 And a lot of traditions within the military
00:50 is to put tattoos that symbolizes
00:53 the units that they came from.
00:56 [upbeat music]
00:58 [gunshots]
01:01 Keanu Reeves was trained by Karen Butler.
01:06 So you could see that played out with Keanu Reeves
01:08 and his training and how he's doing
01:11 that type of instinctive firing.
01:13 It's not that accurate.
01:14 It's more of you point and shoot.
01:15 Now, when it comes to,
01:18 is he that accurate being in the dark?
01:20 John Wick, he knows his house, he knows the terrain.
01:23 When you have all these guys coming in
01:25 and trying to flood the house,
01:29 first, they were coming in as singletons.
01:31 They should have been moving as a team.
01:33 Because they separated themselves,
01:36 John Wick was able to funnel and utilize the darkness.
01:40 [gunshots]
01:42 In a close quarters gunfight,
01:51 it's about angles in the room.
01:53 When John Wick enters a room alone,
01:56 his rear, his six o'clock is exposed.
01:58 Any weapons manipulation from there is exposed.
02:03 And if you look at the house,
02:04 there's hallways, there's stairways,
02:07 there's different levels to a room.
02:09 So when you turn your back,
02:10 you're exposing your back to that threat.
02:14 I thought that Keanu Reeves did a great job
02:17 on doing the hand, the thumb over thumb method,
02:20 which is the proper shooting position
02:22 for the amount of speed that he was driving the gun.
02:25 John Wick kind of threw his legs over
02:31 and kind of took him down,
02:32 almost like a triangle choke on a jujitsu move,
02:37 and then able to take out the other guy with a pistol.
02:41 More Hollywood on that.
02:42 We would never do that in real life
02:44 because if I have to go down and drop my level
02:48 to the ground grappling with somebody,
02:50 now I lost visual and situational awareness
02:53 of everything that's going on around me,
02:55 which is the gunfight.
02:56 Keanu Reeves, he went under very intensive training
03:00 from judo to jujitsu,
03:02 to the amount of tactics he had to learn.
03:04 I rate this as six out of 10.
03:07 I thought the realism in his movements were there.
03:11 The tactics wasn't on point
03:13 when it comes to low light tactics.
03:15 So he looks great and it shows in his movies.
03:20 [grunting]
03:22 It's about surprise, speed, and violence, right?
03:28 What I like about him is, you know,
03:30 he's maximizing concealment, which was darkness, right?
03:34 So you have two things.
03:35 You have cover and you have concealment.
03:37 Cover stops bullets and concealment camouflages you.
03:41 The problem with that scene right there
03:43 was he put his hands over the guy's mouth.
03:46 Guys have lost their fingers doing that.
03:49 [upbeat music]
03:52 When you hit a guy in the head,
03:55 it's kind of hard because he's moving.
03:57 They have body armor on.
03:59 We heal them in the pelvis or the head.
04:00 And we do train to shoot a low percentage target,
04:04 which is a headshot.
04:05 And then we have high percentage targets,
04:07 which is the torso and hip shots.
04:09 Hand-to-hand combat happens a lot in a confined space.
04:17 We enter a room, we eliminate the threat,
04:21 and we have unknowns in the house.
04:23 So if you don't have a weapon, you become an unknown.
04:26 We're gonna have to put our hands on you.
04:29 We're gonna have to secure you with some kind of flex tie
04:33 until we know if you're a threat or non-threat.
04:35 He didn't really break fall.
04:39 So if you fall like that, we actually do a judo break fall.
04:43 To try to eliminate such a hard impact,
04:48 we're trained how to fall
04:50 based off on our hand-to-hand combat training.
04:53 Now, with that fall, that would take the wind out of him.
04:56 But if he has body armor on,
04:57 that will muffle some of the impact.
04:59 I give this a six.
05:01 It was very entertaining.
05:03 I thought Keanu Reeves did some great things
05:05 as in maximizing darkness.
05:08 [upbeat music]
05:13 The time that John Wick took down this target
05:16 was not all that great.
05:18 He did it during the day.
05:19 Nobody wants to attack during the day
05:21 because we wanna maximize surprise.
05:24 In this scenario, if the special forces
05:27 was to take this down, we would contain and isolate
05:30 around that area with snipers.
05:32 So there'll be probably three sniper high position
05:36 with a spotter shooter providing intelligence.
05:40 We're probably gonna wait till it gets darker
05:42 to take down the target.
05:44 [upbeat music]
05:47 - Get down, get down!
05:48 - During my career, I spent eight years as a sniper.
05:52 He used the SRS sniper rifle.
05:55 The SRS sniper rifle is a bullpup design.
05:59 What I saw wrong on this is based on geometry
06:02 of that weapon, John Wick didn't have
06:04 a proper shooting position.
06:05 That means there were areas that he could arrest
06:09 that weapon on to stabilize the weapon more,
06:12 but he decided to go a shooting offhand.
06:15 And also his shooting offhand wasn't on point
06:18 because the shooting offhand we do is more
06:20 like this swivel position and also we use a sling.
06:24 Not a stable shooting position for a sniper.
06:27 [upbeat music]
06:30 During special forces, we have done sabotage
06:37 type of operations.
06:38 That means we'll go in, we'll put explosives on cars
06:40 and we'll blow it up just to disable that ability
06:44 for them to get away or reinforcements.
06:47 [upbeat music]
06:49 And in the end, he came in with a pistol.
06:56 Made no sense.
06:57 Because all the threats wasn't really eliminated
06:59 and coming in with a pistol doesn't have
07:03 the firepower you need to come in.
07:05 I would have came in with definitely a assault rifle.
07:09 I rate this video a five out of 10.
07:13 John Wick didn't really use the capabilities
07:15 of that sniper rifle.
07:16 [upbeat music]
07:19 From my experience working with suppressors,
07:26 it's very hard to get the pistol to be that quiet.
07:29 You know, we haven't had any pistols with our suppressors
07:33 that are that quiet.
07:34 You can fire it without having ear protection,
07:37 but it's not that quiet.
07:38 People would have definitely heard that,
07:40 especially in a subway station.
07:42 Ultimate no-go.
07:48 It's about surprise.
07:50 You don't want to expose your weapon
07:52 or your capability into the end.
07:53 It's about angling your body.
07:55 It's about putting the weapon into a certain
07:58 holding position that conceals that blade,
08:01 but still you can employ the lethality of that blade.
08:06 [upbeat music]
08:08 The problem is he didn't follow up with that movement.
08:14 He kicked the blade with his knees, like a Muay Thai knee,
08:19 and that gives you that initial burst
08:21 to get through whatever hold he's at.
08:23 What the opponent did was he stuck the blade in
08:25 and he pulled it back out.
08:27 We don't want to do that.
08:28 What he should have done was ran the blade
08:30 right down his thigh.
08:31 So Keanu Reeves went into a forward grip position.
08:42 If you back this right here with your thumb right here,
08:46 it gives you what?
08:46 It gives you more force on the cut,
08:48 but if I'm here in this fighting position,
08:51 I'll cut your thumb off, right?
08:53 So if I see that thumb isolated,
08:54 I'm going to cut that thumb.
08:55 So I thought that Keanu Reeves did a great job
08:58 on wrapping that forward position.
08:59 He came in with thrust and the guy blocked him.
09:03 The opponent went into more of a reverse grip position.
09:07 Let's say the opponent, hands in a way,
09:10 allows me to come in.
09:12 Let's say I come in like this, he blocks,
09:15 allows me to parry, use the blade as a hook.
09:18 So you can kind of see on the clip,
09:21 he uses a hook to parry and he tried to come in with a stick.
09:25 So the reverse grip is great,
09:28 but it doesn't give you range.
09:29 It gives you leverage.
09:31 It gives you more power.
09:33 The forward grip position, it gives me range and reach.
09:36 If I was to pick two positions in the train,
09:41 since it's a very close quarters environment,
09:43 I would probably go reverse grip position.
09:46 I thought both of the tactics was executed
09:51 pretty decent in this scene.
09:55 I will give it a four in realism.
09:58 In the special forces, we are trained
10:06 on how to conceal our weapons.
10:08 So we wrap our weapons up.
10:10 We conceal our weapons,
10:12 especially in these type of environments.
10:13 So we don't want to definitely pull out the weapon
10:16 and expose them the way they did.
10:18 So to conceal a weapon is truly tradecraft.
10:23 So we conceal weapons in toolboxes.
10:26 I have taken a drill and conceal weapons
10:29 into like a hand drill.
10:31 We have been reporters.
10:32 We act like reporters and we conceal weapons
10:35 into the camera so we can get close.
10:37 For him to get shot in the gut like that,
10:42 at close quarters, multiple times and move on,
10:46 it's so unrealistic.
10:47 There's no way.
10:48 That's a slow death.
10:50 When you get shot in the stomach,
10:53 you can't, you're not going to be able to move.
10:55 You're not going to be able to do anything,
10:57 but just lay there and bleed out.
10:59 So for him to be able to do that, so unrealistic.
11:02 Joint locks are implemented in the military.
11:09 We like to control people with joint locks
11:12 to take them down.
11:13 So a lot of times when we implement these type of moves,
11:16 it's more controlling the opponent.
11:18 It's to take them down so we can put a flex tie on them,
11:21 so we can search them to see if they're a combatant
11:24 or a non-combatant.
11:25 We're trained on how to take down bigger opponents.
11:31 What I do is I stick my fingers through their eyes.
11:33 I hit them in the ear, mess up their equilibrium.
11:36 When it comes to close quarters battle,
11:44 everything is a weapon.
11:45 In fact, when I travel overseas, I use a pen as a weapon.
11:49 So we do use everything as a weapon.
11:53 So that was realistic.
11:54 Not very realistic to attack John Wick in the public.
11:57 You can't control the area.
11:59 So I give this scene a four out of 10.
12:03 So there was certain shooting positions
12:11 that I saw on John Wick.
12:13 So this is called high compress.
12:15 When I look at the front sight,
12:19 and I'm able to push it to the threat all here,
12:21 this is called a sui li stance.
12:24 So you're putting your weapon here.
12:26 And as you're moving, you can kind of see the hand rotate
12:30 into the firing position.
12:32 We do all these compressed positions
12:33 in case I have a teammate.
12:35 You don't want to point your weapon at somebody.
12:37 They overexpose their hand,
12:39 like overexpose the weapon position like this,
12:42 which shows the weapon before your body.
12:45 So a lot of times we compress the weapon.
12:47 So as, let's say, a door, I'll compress the weapon in.
12:50 I can still fire from this position,
12:52 and I'll move in and drive my gun into the threat area.
12:57 We didn't really see that on the movie.
13:00 Also, you want to be able to pie.
13:02 So if this is a door frame, a door frame here,
13:07 I want to be able to start pieing around that door,
13:11 and you didn't see too much of that.
13:13 (gunshots)
13:15 The problem with that is John Wick started going on his own.
13:21 Right?
13:22 So that doesn't allow you that two-man team that you need.
13:25 They should provide providing cover for each other.
13:28 When they did a reload,
13:29 the other person should have been suppressive fire
13:32 or get a different angle on the threat.
13:35 Because they split up like that,
13:37 there are more singleton in the gunfight.
13:39 And when you're a singleton in that gunfight,
13:41 in that cityscape, you're probably not going to win.
13:44 It kind of reminds me of, you know, Morocco
13:47 or some of the cities I've been to in Africa.
13:50 Multiple threats, multiple angles, alleyways, windows.
13:55 So different levels of threats.
13:57 It is common to have military dogs working beside us.
14:04 So when you come in and civilian clothes,
14:06 you want to lower your posture.
14:08 To have a military working dog with you,
14:10 it looks like a military harness that was on that dog,
14:14 totally exposes your position.
14:16 We bring in dogs when we do direct action operations.
14:20 Yeah, in the Special Forces,
14:27 we are trained on how to shoot various different heights.
14:30 In fact, we go to school to learn high angle shooting.
14:33 We learn to shoot in urban environments
14:36 from the ground level to windows, rooftops.
14:39 I rate it really a two.
14:42 And the reason why is because they had a buddy team.
14:47 They were moving as a buddy team.
14:49 They didn't really support each other's movement.
14:51 They didn't support each other's angles, reloads.
14:54 We do train in throwing blades.
15:02 The thing is, you got to know your distance
15:04 on throwing a blade.
15:05 If you look at John Wick, he threw the blade straight
15:09 or you could rotate a blade in.
15:13 When you rotate a blade in,
15:15 you got to really know that distance.
15:16 When you throw a blade, you lose that weapon.
15:19 In this particular scene,
15:21 though, they had multiple blades that he can get a hold of.
15:23 They were throwing a buoy knife.
15:24 They were throwing these big knives, fixed blade knives.
15:27 Anything can be thrown.
15:30 There are throwing knives that has the geometry
15:33 of the path of the throw.
15:34 But as long as you know the weight
15:37 and you know the distance,
15:38 yeah, you can definitely throw any blade.
15:41 I thought Keanu Reeves did really well
15:43 on his weapons handling.
15:45 I definitely love the way that they improvise with weapons
15:49 because everything is a weapon.
15:50 If I enter that antique shop,
15:53 all those blades I'm going to use.
15:55 All those axes I'm going to use.
15:57 And I give it a seven.
16:03 We usually have a guy driving the motorcycle
16:07 and we have a guy sitting behind him with the weapon.
16:12 Right?
16:12 So it's very hard to run a bike
16:17 and be able to shoot and do all that.
16:19 Motorcycles in the military has been used
16:27 since World War II in reconnaissance type of missions.
16:31 There was a certain point in my Special Forces career,
16:34 especially when we started moving towards the Middle East.
16:37 We needed desert mobility.
16:38 Dirt bikes allow us the ability to quickly get to an area
16:43 to contain and isolate.
16:44 If we need to put more troops on the ground
16:47 to get into areas that it's hard to get,
16:50 you know, big tactical vehicles in.
16:53 Our rated F4 out of a 10,
16:56 we train a lot on shooting off of moving vehicles.
17:04 And it's very difficult.
17:05 And it's almost impossible to control the vehicle
17:08 and shoot accurately like he did.
17:10 In the Special Forces, we do train on defensive driving.
17:19 We work with our up armor vehicle, bulletproof vehicles.
17:23 So heavyweight top vehicle.
17:26 And that changes the tires and how you turn and how you move.
17:29 In the Special Forces, we have a designated driver
17:39 and we have three shooters from the passenger,
17:41 left side rear, right side rear.
17:43 And they're pretty locked in.
17:45 With John Wick driving and moving,
17:47 he's not in good stable position.
17:49 He doesn't have a reflexive optic on his pistol.
17:53 What that means is he has to do sight alignment
17:56 to engage targets accurately at the distance,
18:00 which was, you know, it seems like 15 to 20 yards
18:02 on some of those shots.
18:03 So not very realistic.
18:05 He should have known the different pillars of a car.
18:13 So there are certain areas like they can stop bullets in a car.
18:16 You have your different pillars, A, B, C pillars.
18:19 You have your engine blocks.
18:21 You have your rear axle.
18:22 So those are the points that I would move to,
18:25 to provide me cover from getting fired
18:29 from the different angles and opponents.
18:31 So he didn't maximize cover in any of those moves.
18:35 He actually just went around the car
18:37 and started shooting the bad guys.
18:38 I'll give it a two.
18:39 And he was in a city in the middle of the street,
18:42 which, man, you have a lot of threats at different angles.
18:45 So you want to get off that X and he didn't do that.
18:48 He fought on the X.
18:49 [GUNSHOTS]
18:55 About all rounds do go through wall.
18:57 He didn't really maximize cover.
18:59 You know, he went behind walls that bullets will go through.
19:03 So you want to start picking out angles in the house
19:08 that will provide you cover.
19:17 To clear a room is to dominate the room by going
19:20 to points of domination.
19:21 We like to control the room by putting players
19:24 in certain control points in the room.
19:26 We provide interlocking fire when we go
19:29 to these points of domination.
19:30 That means if I have five assaulters in a room,
19:33 we're interlocking fire into the kill zone.
19:35 So if you're staying in the center of that kill zone,
19:37 there's no chance you're going to live.
19:39 You know, I wouldn't clear it like John would clear it.
19:42 He didn't pie.
19:43 I didn't see him take out the corners in the room.
19:49 And he ran center of the room.
19:52 When you run center of the room, you start swinging your weapon.
19:55 You're not maximizing cover and utilizing the walls, right?
19:59 So when you enter that room, you go start in the center
20:02 and you start swinging around.
20:04 That's not the tactics we want.
20:05 What you see in this particular clip is the dragon's breath.
20:12 And although it's real, it has to be custom made.
20:15 And it's really illegal in a lot of states.
20:17 Being in John Wick's situation, he's a singleton coming
20:21 into multiple gunfights, different angles.
20:24 You're going to have to get into some of those positions
20:27 to drop your level, to get the round cover.
20:29 I give it a four.
20:30 So if you look at this stairway, it's a funnel point.
20:37 And it doesn't allow them the upper lay position they need.
20:41 That means that they're constantly having to fight
20:43 to a superior position.
20:45 The bad guys, being on the high ground, they got superior position.
20:49 You're in the worst position because you're in a fatal funnel,
20:53 fighting to gain terrain that the enemy has.
20:56 And these type of scenarios didn't play out very well in past battles.
21:01 We will never attack a stairwell like this,
21:04 especially when there's different avenues to get in.
21:08 If I fell down those stairs, I wouldn't get up, right?
21:12 So for any normal person that falls down those flight of stairs,
21:17 you're probably out of the fight.
21:18 We would have put sharpshooters or snipers out
21:29 in containment isolation around those stairs
21:32 to make sure that they didn't get up.
21:33 We would have put sharpshooters or snipers out
21:36 in containment isolation around those stairs
21:39 to allow people to move up.
21:41 That unknown guy, he should have been in a stagnant position,
21:45 in a support by fire position to allow John Wick and Kane
21:49 to move up those stairs.
21:51 That would not be a good gun to use as backup
21:53 because first, it's a fixed sight.
21:55 If you look on there, there's no optic on there.
21:57 There's no lasers.
21:58 There's nothing that gives him that nighttime capability.
22:02 So you want some kind of machine gun
22:05 or you want some kind of assault rifle.
22:08 This character, Kane, in this clip is played by Donnie Yen,
22:19 who's a very popular martial artist throughout the world.
22:22 There's better ways to get out of that choco
22:24 than to employ a pencil and hit him in the hand.
22:28 If somebody chokes you,
22:29 they basically invested one hand into holding you down.
22:34 So they only have one hand here.
22:36 So you still have both of your hands.
22:38 You still have both of your hands.
22:39 So if I'm getting choked and I have both of my hands,
22:41 I can either break away from that grip,
22:45 which is an easy move,
22:46 or I can strike in the throat, in the eyes.
22:48 I can hit them in the equilibrium areas and mess them up.
22:51 I give it a four.
22:52 My favorite John Wick scene was when he went into the room
22:56 and he was in the bathroom.
22:57 My favorite John Wick scene was when he went
23:00 into that antique shop and he was throwing all those blades.
23:03 And the reason why is because when you get into a fight,
23:07 it's about grabbing what's around you
23:10 and using it as a weapon.
23:11 I thought that was displayed very well in that scene.
23:14 Thanks for watching.
23:15 If you enjoyed this video, why not click on the next one?
23:18 (upbeat music)
23:21 (upbeat music)
23:23 (upbeat music)