John Wick’s Bulletproof Suit Makes the Series More Believable, Not Less | Hacker News Reader

John Wick’s Bulletproof Suit Makes the Series More Believable, Not Less

blakeashleyjr.com

55 pointsblakeashleyjr91 comments

The author makes good points - but honestly I don't care too much about the explanation behind _why_ the protagonist is seemingly invincible. John Wick movies are fun due to the camera work, fighting scene choreography and the "cool" characters. Most action movies don't require you to think too much about what's going on, and that's fine, imo.

>Most action movies don't require you to think too much about what's going on, and that's fine, imo.

I beg to differ. If your hero is vulnerable, then the stakes are high and you're always on the edge of your seat throughout the fights as you don't know whether he'll make it out alive or not. But when your hero has some magic bullshit armor that makes him invulnerable, then the audience stop caring about his fights because you know for sure he's invincible anyway and the fights just seem pointless and forgettable no matter how flashy they are.

Take the first Matrix movie of 1999 also with Keanu Reeves. When Neo was fighting Agent Smith in the subway, the whole theater was dead silent because Neo was just a man going up against an invulnerable foe, and that was exciting, but in the sequels when Neo became this invulnerable Superman, people were much less invested even though the fights were flashier, because the stakes were much lower since he's now basically invincible so nobody can hurt him anyway.

It's like playing videogames with God mode on. Nobody cares if you win.

Plot armor is as strong as a bulletproof suit.

It is, but good film making is not making the plot armor obvious to the audience.

I think the issue with Matrix is that going from vulnerable to invulnerable is a downgrade. However, if the invulnerability is "part of the contract", then you don't have this downgrade. You can also have low stakes with a vulnerable hero if you don't care about him.

There's a huge gap in having non-Comic/non-Superpower/non-SciFi action movies.

For all the reasons why John Wick is successful, so was Top Gun 2.

People want to see just good'ole realistic action movies (that aren't SciFi/Comic)

Decades ago, we have Jason Bourne, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, etc. Today we have so little of these types of movies.

I only mention this because you put it in italics, but John Wick and Jason Bourne aren't remotely realistic, they might as well have superpowers. The last thing anyone wants to see in an action movie is realism.

realistic in the sense that, it's not superpowers/futuristic/comic-hero.

I think they likely meant closer to current technology and society. The Mission Impossible movies, for example.

I’d argue the first Bourne movie was pretty realistic. It was the sequels that built things up too much.

We need to bring back the 80s action movie dynamic where a giant bodybuilder physique meant being an expert at gunplay, vehicles and all physical activities.

You might like Reacher https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9288030/

The Raid 1 and 2 were a breath of fresh air for that, if you liked John Wick I would absolutely recommand them.

Totally agree.

I think it's related to the "Suspension of disbelief" theory, where audiences are Ok with things that are not realistic as long as they make sense in that universe.

But it's like an uncanny valley, where the more realistic you try to be, the more critical the audience will be, and less likely are to turn off that disbelief contract between audience and authors.

A good example would be the Midichlorians thing. Trying to make magic more scientific and realistic ironically makes it less believable to the audience.

This is why I sometimes like to argue that Star Wars is a harder science fiction universe than Star Trek (at least comparing onscreen canon.) Space-wizards notwithstanding (which ST has plenty of anyway), Star Trek tries to explain too much, and pays little to no attention to actual science and it comes off seeming silly as a result.

Meanwhile, in the Millennium Falcon, you just pull the lever and spacetime goes brrr. No bullshit about subspace, inverse tachyon pulses, dilithium crystals, or negative space wedgies. It's seems realistic in ways Star Trek doesn't.

> lever and spacetime goes brrr

but then you have WW2 bombing runs in space, spaceships with gravity fed bomb hatches! dogfights with guns that miss all the time and are unable to autoaim, hilarious chase scenes ...

And Star Trek is basically naval combat in space, with ships flying ridiculously close to one another, dogfights with weapons that miss all the time and are unable to autoaim, etc. Star Trek ships bank in space just like planes, same as in Star Wars. One of the most beloved episodes of the original series had the crew of the Enterprise keeping quiet so they didn't trip Romulan space sonar, because they literally just filed the serial numbers off a submarine movie.

Neither is more realistic than the other when it comes to portraying space combat, but at least in Star Wars it doesn't look like wargamers chipping away at each another's HP until a ship explodes.

Obligatory plug for space combat in the Expanse.

Have not seen the series yet, but looking forward to it! Currently reading through the books (book 6 atm) and want to finish the book series prior to starting the Prime series. :)

read the books, skip the series.

instead watch youtube compilations of vfx shots from the series. there is some good stuff there.

It’s better but far from perfect. The Expanse also totally missed that there’s no such thing as stealth in space due to IR emissions from any life support.

And battlestar galactica.

Why doesn't the rebellion build missiles out of small hyperspace-capable ships. Just point them at capital ships and hit go. According to the last jedi, this would be crazy effective.

I'm actually in the midst of a Reddit argument about what the anime "BNA" is about, which really comes down to the premises of what justifies suspension of disbelief. It's a Studio Trigger show, and they are known for adding in a lot of over the top elements with subtextual justifications that give love-it-or-hate-it reactions.

But with this one, it seems like audiences had no idea how to read the subtext and took it to be "Zootopia racism allegory." So the reading of the rest of the text was completely thrown off and ability to suspend disbelief was lost. Most reviews, even from critics who should have the necessary cultural background, say the writing makes no sense or is contradictory.

The actual subtext is "Modern Japan's History". Which, if you know Trigger shows well, you know they've done before in Kill La Kill. And with this reading, and a little knowledge of the various events, it makes perfect sense what is going on, even if the specifics are pretty tangled: the use of traditional mythical creatures, re-opening to the West, the coming of Christian missionaries, etc. There's a main plot, but it discusses these things mostly in episodic fashion, loosely repurposing various symbolic elements to suit the scene. The way in which this repurposing occurs has a nice way of merging otherwise disparate themes into a tapestry of resemblances. That's the centerpiece of the storytelling, and I think they did a marvelous job of weaving it all together and still maintaining a character-driven surface text in a 12 episode series. It's rewatchable, and you can spot new readings in it each time. Nothing is being wasted in the writing.

But...it's also clearly inaccessible, going by the reviews. Nobody who wanted another Zootopia wants to be told that actually, there was one episode roughly about that, but also ones about disenfranchised war veterans, exploitation of the poor, the influence of cults on politics, etc. The way in which it rushes through all of those things without time to add a lot of "narrative arrows" for every theme ensured that people were never going to follow along well, especially not foreign audiences.

Realism, in the end, comes down to what you believe reality is supposed to be, and that tends to be something an audience older than about 8 years of age is burdened with when they try to experience a story: they can't read it as anything but what they know is normal. So adding magic or magic-indistinguishable technology as a symbolic component - a "wish away the problem" - often does work better than most other strategies of discussing reality. The extra indirection allows profundities to slip into the viewer's mind.

But when the premises are unclear to the audience, magic and other fantastical elements also tends to get the reactions BNA got - "I don't know what this is about, and also, why isn't it doing the thing it is about." And from there the nitpicking about how it's unrealistic or "forced" writing sets in.

My main problem with the later parts is, that in the first it was some kind of super killer versus normal but later with the whole mythology it became just a different kind of super hero movie with super villains and bullet proof cloths.

The first part had some part of reality left just like the first Matrix movie where the fights felt more real because the fighters hit each other instead of the standard Kung Fu movie dodging until the deadly blow.

The movies are still fun to watch because of great choreography but to me it doesn't have the same impact like the first. It shifted from "could happen somewhere now" to "happens in a parallel reality"

P.S. For me they made the same mistakes with Kingsmen. Of course they need a substitute for the surprise factor that most first installments have, like Pirates of the Caribbean or Nobody with Bob Odenkirk

Hack smith has a great video where they make a bulletproof suit and show that it’s possible! https://youtu.be/Eeb4aZObp-0

Kyle Hill, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpn4ImFo0Dg

Love that video! Linked to it in the footnotes because it partially inspired the post.

The deformation on the clay makes it very clear that yes, stopping the bullet was good, but there's still a lot of energy there that is really going to hurt and potentially do damage.

I'll take three broken ribs if that means I'm still alive. But yes, it doesn't quite meet the John Wick requirements.

My biggest problem with those imaginary suits is the transfer of energy.

Even if a lightweight bulletproof material like that can be made, there needs to be some symptom of energy transfer visible to the eye. Otherwise, it's not sci-fi; it's magic

In the 2nd movie (and perhaps other places), he gets shot repeatedly with rifles. Even if the shots don't penetrate, the repeated impact alone would break ribs and leave him incapacitated.

It's suggested that he is having ribs broken, or at least badly bruised, by every major hit

I think that could still kill as well. Repeated shots break the ribs, and a subsequent shot pushes a broken piece of rib into the lung causing bleeding into the lung or maybe pneumothorax.

Either that or the kevlar failing due to repeated shots. It's not meant to be shot in the same place more than once.

Still more believable than Matrix style bullet dodging, though.

That's my main gripe with how the bulletproof suits were shown in the fourth movie. There is a difference between getting shot in the chest and actually catching a bullet with your suit while using it as a shield. The former is believable because the kinetic energy would dissipate in your ribs (possibly breaking them) the later isn't because it's roughly equivalent to dissipating the bullet's energy using your arm.

OTOH it's a John Wick movie, expecting anything to be very relatistic is already thinking one step too far.

I haven't mathed this out, but from experience from jumping (both from heights and towards ledges) I would think that our arms and legs are much better shock absorbers than our ribs. If you hold something like a shield, you are primarily using your triceps and shoulder muscles as springs to dissipate the impact over the distance of about a foot. Of course there are issues with that, but it's much better than your rips which can move much less before breaking.

Good thing John Wick isn't scifi then. It'd be like complaining that the Predator has elements that aren't realistic when it comes to physics: it's true, but it's not exactly the point of the movie to make you think deeply about physics, is it ?

A 9mm round (most typical in John Wick) is around 600J of muzzle energy (and John Wick fights are extremely close range so we can use the same estimate for impact). That's in the range of a strong punch by a good boxer (a good heavyweight can be well over 1000J).

Punches don't ragdoll humans and neither should bullets stopped by a ballistic vest.

on the other hand, a bullet isn't stopped by bullet proof fabric, it's stopped by what's behind it. If I take a 9mm round to the arm then my arm is breaking. That 600J is focused on a much smaller area than a heavyweight punch.

Yea this. Now conceivably such a sci-fi suit might have a non-Newtonian reaction to a bullet impact and automatically spread the force over a wider area in a somehow non-destructive way.

Dunno about sci-fi, but some tactical gear is incorporating D3O today (see https://www.deltathreeoscar.com/). And I suspect the most advanced stuff is not quite public.

No, that’s the magic of the bulletproof fabric. Imagine the energy of the bullet is distributed across the entire garment.

I think that is our problem, we have a hard time imagining how the energy could be distributed across the garment.

You could sell me on Non-Newtonian-Kevlar though: Pliant to a slow crease, rock-hard with a sudden strike.

---

Oh man I thought I was making that up, but it's a thing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Armor The future is now!

It also doesn't have to spread it out over a particularly large area. If we are talking about the force of a punch from a good boxer, we only have to spread it over the area of the front of a boxing glove. That seems perfectly reasonable for a fabric layer soaked with a non-Newtonian fluid.

> You could sell me on Non-Newtonian-Kevlar though: Pliant to a slow crease, rock-hard with a sudden strike.

"Nanomachines, son. They harden in response to physical trauma."

According to that page, BAE systems et al were using kevlar soaked in a solution of polyethylene glycol and silica nanoparticles.

All readily available online, if you can afford something like $200 per 2ml of silica nanoparticles. It would be amazing to see one of the YouTube channels that has tried making their own, just make the real thing.

I imagine a suit made of dripping wet Kevlar wouldn't be too comfortable though. John Wick would experience some chafing.

If the physics is to be believed then it should be roughly the same as being punched in the arm by a strong guy. So long as you aren't suffering from osteoporosis you should be able to take the hit. The trick with bulletproof materials is to spread the energy out, the fabric would need to be like a super oobleck where it becomes completely rigid when hit by a bullet and then return to being flexible afterward. If it is bulletproof but still acts like fabric then the bullet will just pull it along as it pierces through your body.

Where did OP mention that a human should be ragdolled by a bullet?

Also, I'd love to see you take a punch by a good boxer and remain even remotely still.

Agree on the ragdoll thing, but 600J spread out over 50cm^2 is different than than concentrated on 0.75cm^2.

Even if it stopped the bullet, id assume it could break ribs.

A punch from a good boxer into an area smaller than a a boxer's fist, frequently without any kind of preparation or bracing. Yeah it shouldn't ragdoll someone but that seems far more impactful than portrayed.

No worries, it's a Culture suit with a built-in trapdoor system (Iain M. Banks)

> "Trapdoor system: A mechanism that transports any unwanted energy inside of the ship into hyperspace, so it can't be destroyed by internal attacks. It was stated that you could set off an H-bomb inside of a Culture ship if you were right next to it, and all of the energy would be instantly transported into hyperspace so it would seem like nothing had happened at all." (outskirtsbattledomewiki)

Im Colombian. The bullet proof suit has existed since the late 90s. We invented it.

It's from the 16th century

The bulletproof suits are acceptable leaps of logic that I’m fine with. The bigger issue is keeping things consistent. Try as I may I just can’t keep thinking about how easy everyone else in that universe is to kill compared to the hero. And the most unbelievable scene for me was the two on one knife fight.

They make them in Toronto as well: https://garrisonbespoke.com/custom-suits/bespoke-bulletproof...

While I haven't used Garrison personally, owing to some personal loyalty to another century old family one here, most of the other people I know who get suits made here use them, and I have watched their story evolve. By adaptating and actually growing their own market, I think they have preserved the traditions of their craft better than anyone else, by keeping them viable while maintaining their standards.

The armour is a gimmick to me, as the whole symbology of a suit is that it represents establishment membership where other than the occasaional regicide, getting shot just isn't a thing - unless you are a politician or some other kind of criminal with airs.

Since they don't mention any actual specifics on the class of protection afforded by the body armor, it definitely looks like a gimmick to me.

I always thought the John Wick character represented death itself.

That's a very interesting lens to view the series through. Haven't seen the newest one yet but I'd have suggested he is Karma incarnate.

He has the Midas touch-- everyone around him dies. Everything he touches dies. Yet he persists as an unstoppable force of nature, bringing death and destruction wherever he goes-- including to his loved ones.

As punishment for his previous life as a hitman, he's locked into this weird purgatory where everything he cares about is systematically taken from him at every opportunity (from his actual family to his "work family," his cherished car and even his very identity).

What I've seen of the series so far has him constantly on the run. You can't outrun your past forever.

Like... Chip Zdarsky wrote a Superman who forgot that Kryptonians have pressure points even though he's used them in combat repeatedly on Kryptonians in recent years while simultaneously having Batman survive a fall from orbit while riding a box to save the day.

Plot armor is truly the most unbeatable superpower.

I’ve not seen the most recent John Wick but I’m just going to point out that “gun-fu” is a long standing film trope and not a “new martial art”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_fu

The bulletproof suits were willy, but not as silly as him falling 5 floors and not getting killed.

Of course, I didn't like this move either. The magic is that John is human, and they sully that notion by making him survive a 5-story fall.

Yes, and that really hurt the audience more than John Wick.

After that, they were no stakes anymore, because you knew anything could go and it would not matter.

Case in point: in the first (second?) movie, he get stabbed once, and it changes the whole rhythm of the film. You are thinking "oh shit, now everything he does will have to be performed with this wound". And the story matches that, his moves are not the same. He has to overcome this problem, and there is a lot of suffering. It makes you care such much about him.

In the latest one, he gets hit by 3 cars and you go "meh".

I did enjoy JW4, but not remotely as much as the first one, where we were counting bullets and it matched the known gun capacity.

Now it's just another dumb action block buster, albeit a superb one.

It's the tragedy of the common because most viewers will be happy with the DBZ effect taking over. So it's a commercial success. But it has lost part of what made the concept special.

People will remember the feeling of seeing JW1 forever, it set a standard. We compare things to it in the same way we compared things to the Terminator, Alien or the Matrix (twice Keanu? Really?).

It created its own category.

JW4 will just fade away.

He gets injured repeatedly, badly, in the 4th movie and it absolutely affects how he fights over the course of the movie.

It's one of the best parts about the series: the protagonist isn't invincible, he's just very good. But when he gets hurt, he actually gets hurt and needs to recover from those injuries (or take drugs to cover the pain).

Edit: it seems a lot of people commenting on the invincibility of John Wick did not actually watch the 4th movie. Spoiler alert: by the final showdown, he's barely conscious and keeps going despite his accumulated injuries solely due to sheer force of will, and ultimately dies of his injuries.

The guys falls from one story, flat on the concrete floor, gets hit by multiple cars, and absorbs the kinetic energy of dozens of bullets, and yet can still climb stairs and fight at the same time.

What are you talking about?

He is wolverine in JW4.

It's a movie. It's not going to be 100% realistic. That being said...

He's wearing a suit that is designed to absorb and dissipate kinetic energy. It makes sense that it would help dissipate the kinetic energy of landing on concrete and getting hit by cars.

If you paid attention you noticed that after these impacts, he was significantly slower as a result of the injuries, and was less capable after than he was before. By the final showdown, he's literally struggling to stand, multiple bones are bruised or broken, and he keeps going by sheer force of will.

He is wolverine in JW4.

Literally, no, if you saw the movie all the way to the end. (Spoiler alert: JW dies from his accumulated injuries.)

Oh, got own by trolling again.

I still make this mistake after all those years.

FYI, there is a bit of truth to these.

https://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/02/01/bogota.bulletp...

The guy/company making these has done pretty well in the intervening years and has a pretty nice website now too.

https://miguelcaballero.com/

The final movie was by far the worst in the franchise. They completely abandoned a lot of the attention to detail and carefully managed suspension of disbelief that characterized the first movie.

Turns out they fired/didn't hire the guy who wrote the first 3, which explains why number 4 was basically just a generic lowbrow super-hero movie with none of the sauce of the others.

> which explains why number 4 was basically just a generic lowbrow super-hero movie with none of the sauce of the others.

I dunno, I watched the first one and if you slept through the roughly 30 seconds of plot exposition it was just a guy murdering everybody he set eyes on (and probably some that he didn't even bother to look at). At least with lowbrow superhero movies there's at least a minute of heavy-handed moralizing per hour.

Yeah, but the murdering was:

* Well motivated * Tightly scripted and shot * Had a lot of attention to mechanics, and attention to detail where it was important

I was also in favour of the bulletproof suits. The progression in the John Wick series is actually extremely well-done: in JW1 he outclasses his opponents in every metric except numbers; in JW2 he meets several opponents whose hand-to-hand prowess equals his own and he struggles when the plot denies him his guns - but his shooting prowess remains an advantage throughout.

In JW3 a higher class of mooks are added to the mix, who are clumsy in their heavy armor but immune to most small arms fire. They require close-up kill shots or less practical weapons like slow-reloading shotguns to dispatch. Wick’s first encounter with these armored soldiers is actually film-making genius: https://youtu.be/e7VegkzbJOY , it plays out like a usual scene where he guns down the mooks with ease… and right as the viewer feels like the scene is about to end, one of the shot-down soldiers coughs and simply gets back up, startling John, and we see him have to empty entire mags into each opponent to actually kill them.

JW4 ups the ante once again, giving most mooks the same kind of bulletproof suit that John has. The result is that in many fights, gunshots are mostly long-range punches that have to be combined with regular punches and other martial arts to overpower the opponent thoroughly enough that a coup-de-grace headshot can be delivered.

There is an absolutely valid criticism of the JW series, though, and that is the falls. Particularly the five story fall at the end of JW3, and there’s at least one and maybe two in JW4 that egregiously break suspension of disbelief. It’s a clumsy mis-step in terms of film-making craft, as big falls are the gold standard of final death in movies. It even hurts a pivotal scene in JW4 where a mid-boss dies by falling two stories directly onto his head - when I saw it in theaters, I could unfortunately sense the audience expecting the mid-boss to get back up like John Wick would have. Because of the non-lethal fall in JW3, they didn’t really buy that this boss had actually died.

Another valid criticism, specifically for JW4 alone, is that it has one scene which too-shamelessly tries to recapture the magic of the club shootout moment where Wick is backlit by the visualization, 3:40 here in the original https://youtu.be/0L9SzBANF0w and 0:50 here in JW4 https://youtu.be/iEyNlN9AGLE. It also tries to re-use the club scene music, but I think it succeeds here just on the raw awesomeness of doing a full 3-minute one-take Hotline Miami reference https://youtu.be/LdWdPykQhSQ.

Excellent points.

> It even hurts a pivotal scene in JW4 where a mid-boss dies by falling two stories directly onto his head - when I saw it in theaters, I could unfortunately sense the audience expecting the mid-boss to get back up like John Wick. Because of the non-lethal fall in JW3, they didn’t really buy that this boss had actually died.

Especially when JW took a similar fall only a few moments earlier and gets right back up.

I've never had an issue with the suit, the lack of headshots on the other hand....

I haven't seen the 3rd or 4th movies. Does anyone just wear a helmet made of the same material?

Lol, I don't think they do but this raises a good question as to why. (Could claim it's not see-through so you'd only have the eyes left to hit). Maybe in JW5.

They do. John has to get creative to get those guys.

The high table soldiers do wear commercially sourced ballistic helmets that stop handgun bullets IRL (and some rifle rounds). UHMWPE is truly a wonder material.

The John Wick sequels lack the restraint that made the original so enjoyable.

ok so why not make a bulletproof helmet and ski mask?

Look I'm not watching these because of realism... I'm here for bad Keanu Reeves delivery but mindless martial art mayhem.

They do eventually send helmeted foes that have to be creatively dispatched at the end of three and throughout 4.

That's pretty much what the high table task force is wearing in the 3rd movie and the solution is to use bigger guns.

I don't care about realism, I just want Neo Wick to go pew pew pew with his flat lined emotional expressions, dodging bullets while taking revenge for his dead dog with what seems 5 movies ago.

This is pretty much what Dune did.

With this series, I reckon one should not trouble oneself too much with “believability”.

I think there is a difference between "realism" and "believability". Even the hardest fantasy and sci-fi needs to be believable, even if it is completely unrealistic.

And by that I mean, it needs to follow a predictable and understandable set of rules that make sense. I think John Wick does that (besides falling off the occasional building.)

What’s clever about this particular narrative trick is that it obeys a kind of conservation of disbelief: reduce the number of impossible things your audience has to believe in by having them flow naturally from just one or two impossibilities, which you can then spend more time grounding ahead of time to make them feel more real. (The trick of grounding an impossibility is another thing entirely, but comes down to introducing it in a way that lets the audience accept it as either utterly fantastical or deceptively mundane.)

Tech people talking about movies sure are the worst.

No no, tech people talking about tech people talking about movies are the worst.

No no no, tech people talking to tech people talking about movies are cunts

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