Spread To The West
The popularity of John Woo's films, and the heroic bloodshed genre in general, in the West helped give the gun fu style greater visibility. Film-makers like Robert Rodriguez were inspired to create action sequences modelled on the Hong Kong style. One of the first to demonstrate this was Rodriguez's Desperado (1995). The Matrix (1999) played a part in making "gun fu" the most popular form of firearm-based combat in cinema worldwide; since then, the style has become a staple of modern Western action films.
One classic gun fu move consists of reloading two pistols simultaneously by releasing the empty magazines, pointing the guns to the ground, dropping two fresh magazines out of one's jacket sleeves, or strapped to one's legs, into the guns, and then carrying on shooting. In the film Bulletproof Monk (2003), The Monk With No Name (portrayed by Chow Yun-fat) empties two pistols, ejects the magazines and spins to kick the empty magazines at his assailants. In The Rundown (2003), Beck (Dwayne Johnson) fires two shotguns, flips both to be up-side down and pointing backwards, and snaps them between his arms and torso to reload them in an instant. The style is also featured (albeit in a small way and with the assistance of gadgets) in the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movies. In Wanted (2008), assassins belonging to The Fraternity possess the skill of "bending" bullets around obstacles; in a gunfight early in the film, one assassin knocks another bullet out of the air with his own round. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Agent Zero (Daniel Henney) reloads his handguns by throwing them into the air and catching them with the magazines he's holding in his hands.
1992 saw the introduction of gun fu to the horror movie script. In Sam Raimi's cult classic Army of Darkness (1993), Ash (Bruce Campbell) uses a 12 gauge Remington double-barreled stage coach gun as both a close combat weapon and as the gun it is. Many scenes show Ash doing flips over the various undead, landing, shooting over his shoulder, even throwing the weapon and catching it only to continue to fire.
The character John Preston (Christian Bale) demonstrates a system of martial arts called Gun Kata in writer/director Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium (2002). Gun Kata is differentiated from other Gun Fu styles by a focus on rote memorization of probabilities, instead of feats of pure reflex. Through repeated simulations and practice, practitioners are able to fire at their attacker's position, while moving out of their attacker's most likely return fire trajectory and essentially dispatching their enemy while dodging their enemies' bullets. Preston also has special devices mounted into his sleeves/wrists that feed magazines smoothly into his weapon, but the Gun Kata itself provides him with optimum firing angles as well as defensive postures and movements. The 2006 film Ultraviolet, also written and directed by Wimmer, featured much-anticipated "Gun Kata 2.0" scenes, which utilized a super-powered protagonist and futuristic technology to expand on the Gun Kata ideas created in Equilibrium.
In the 2010 movie, Kick-Ass, the character Hit-Girl, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, uses a lot of gun fu.
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