Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

Steven Poole on the real defintion of a decent videogame film

You are creeping through a grand hotel lobby, dark save for pools of yellow light, and the enemy is advancing in stealthy formation. At length you engage, punching one guy and shooting the other – but the bullets from your handgun ping harmlessly off his black armour. And the next few ping off his black helmet. Damn it, these guys are tanks. You manage to lever one guy’s visor open and shoot him in the face, but it’s clear you need more firepower.

So back you scurry to the weapons cache, located in a tastefully furnished safe room, which is literally a giant safe. There is classical music playing. You scan the walls for guns. Maybe a shotgun will do the trick. Your partner holds up a red cartridge and notes: “Armour-piercing.” Excellent! You load up, and load out. Those armoured guys aren’t going to kill themselves.

This is an immensely satisfying trope – meet suddenly hard-to-beat enemies, find new tool to defeat them with – and could be a downbeat, moody moment in a Splinter Cell or Modern Warfare game from any time in the past decade-and-a-half. But the particular scene I am describing is from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, another Keanu Reeves-led masterpiece. And it’s a beautiful example of what clever film-makers can borrow from videogames, as opposed to what grumpy critics actually think they do.

Each film in the John Wick franchise so far, indeed, has been denounced by some or other grumpy critic as being “like a videogame”, which is what people say when they have no idea what videogames are like, and also don’t really understand the genre of balletic ultraviolence they are being forced to look at on the big screen. They probably once saw a clip of some frenetic FPS on the news and are comparing that to the films kids watch these days: nothing but guns blazing for two hours and enemies obediently falling down as if in a shooting gallery.

Of course, this isn’t what a John Wick film is like either: there’s much more kung fu

involved, for a start. But what it does do, with a subtle wink, is nod to certain videogame conventions – like the new enemies with armour and the massive gun cupboard – as a kind of metatextual joke that will delight those familiar with the referenced material, while those who aren’t won’t be missing anything important. Like jokes for the adults in children’s movies, they’re not aimed at the primary audience, but are Easter eggs for the cognoscenti. And, as we know, marketing a film primarily at a videogame-playing audience is something that leads repeatedly to disaster. The contrast could hardly be greater, indeed, between the pretty intergeneric finesses of John Wick 3 and the online outcry over the trailer for the new Sonic The Hedgehog movie. Not because it looked like a terrible film, though it did: the kind of liveaction-meets-CGI romp that gives the word ‘romp’ a bad name. But for the fans, it was unacceptable because Sonic didn’t look like Sonic: rather than being made of heartwarming 16bit pixels, he now had distractingly realistic fur, and a mouthful of teeth. Teeth! (Spiny-mammal fact: real hedgehogs do have teeth, finding them useful to chew their food with.)

So a mere film trailer about a cartoon blue hedgehog with teeth was, one critic declared grandly, a “slap in the face” to fans. If you think about it, it was definitely not a slap in the face: a slap in the face hurts, while someone making a film about a blue hedgehog – even if you really like some earlier version of that blue hedgehog – causes you no harm at all. Nonetheless, online hordes of angry men piled on, until the film’s director himself, Jeff Fowler, was driven to announce they would change Sonic’s look before release.

This was yet more evidence that the most fractious and entitled whiny ‘snowflakes’ in modern culture aren’t Millennials or younger folk, as older conservatives routinely claim; they’re actually Gen-Xers, grown up on videogames, comics and fantasy novels, who have been hypnotised into thinking that their fandom earns them some creative control, that they are in some sense co-owners of the corporate-entertainment franchise products they have spent their lives consuming. Myself, I just hope the John Wick films keep coming – and that their makers never, ever ‘listen to the fans’. After all, the real problem with the Sonic film, as far as one can judge from the trailer, is not the teeth: it’s that it is going to be nothing like a videogame.

Marketing a film primarily at a videogame-playing audience is something that leads repeatedly to disaster