Footage descriptions of the upcoming John Wick: Chapter 4 show that his greatest skill is his versatility. With the John Wick films becoming a rival to The Expendables, Keanu Reeves is set to return as the legendary assassin John Wick a.k.a. Baba Yaga, with the movie hitting theaters on March 23, 2023. Though the first trailer has not yet debuted, footage of John Wick 4 has been unveiled in one setting.
At the 2022 CinemaCon, the first footage of John Wick 4 was showcased. The footage reportedly included John using a pair of nunchaku against an opponent. Though still unrevealed to the wider public, the John Wick 4 footage description re-emphasizes John as a man of many skills in the arts of combat and assassination.
This simple description of the John Wick 4 footage succinctly demonstrates John Wick’s biggest strength: he is versatile and can easily adapt. In the first three movies of the series, John’s skill set is shown to be a very expansive one. When finding himself in the heat of a gunfight against soldiers of the High Table in John Wick: Chapter 3 -Parabellum, there’s no firearm he can’t adopt and wield with maximum efficiency. When the situation calls for John to go on the run, he can also adapt to a wide range of different modes of transportation, from motorcycles to horseback. On top of these skill sets, John’s talent as a martial artist is highly adaptable and multi-faceted, with the same being true for the John Wick series itself.
John is an exponent of numerous martial arts forms, and while his base is primarily Judo, he’s able to adapt his fighting skills as situations call for him to do so. John’s familiarity with different fighting forms makes him well-prepared to take on opponents from many different combat backgrounds, with the John Wick series utilizing many martial arts. Extending his skills to weapons, John is also very deadly with both swords and knives.
John Wick 4 looks set to further show his weapons-based skills with his wielding of a set of nunchaku. The weapon itself is actually a fitting one in this regard, being so closely associated with Bruce Lee. In his founding of Jeet Kune Do and philosophy of the nature of water, Lee believed that adaptability to any opponent or situation was the highest combat virtue of martial arts. Lee’s famed quote about this boils his philosophy down to “Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, add what is essentially your own,” and it’s one that both John Wick and the John Wick martial arts ensemble franchise have clearly internalized.
Director Chad Stahelski knows this philosophy well, having studied with Dan Inosanto, the most widely-known ambassador for Lee’s teachings since his death. In applying this to the John Wick movies, Stahelski, Keanu Reeves, and the franchise’s vast stunt team have elevated it to where it is as one of the biggest action movie series in the world. John Wick’s greatest asset is his ability to adapt and utilize skills from a wide range of disciplines, just as Bruce Lee championed, as the footage description of John Wick: Chapter 4 drives home.
