15 Best Movies Like John Wick Action Thrillers of All Time

Movies like John Wick have such a big effect on culture because they go beyond what people expect from action movies. Each John Wick film has been better than the last. The franchise has gained a lot of fans over the years, which is why John Wick: Chapter 4 was one of the biggest movies of 2023 and the most successful movie in the series so far. As the series grows into more movies, it’s even more amazing to think that it all started with a simple, underrated action movie in 2014 about a man who fights back against people who hurt his puppy.

Fans are now looking for other stylish and exciting action films to watch since John Wick: Chapter 4 feels like the end of the story (at least for now). They are lucky that they can still stream a lot of great action films that were affected by or led to the John Wick series. In these kinds of movies like John Wick, the main character is usually a tough guy with dangerous skills that he uses on unlucky foes. There are also lots of exciting action scenes and the pace never slows down. There are some great old action films and some great new ones in movies like John Wick.

The Top 15 Movies Like John Wick in 2024:

A Company Man

A Company Man, a South Korean action movie from 2012, has a lot in common with John Wick. One big similarity is how it mixes the world of professional killers with different public fronts that are a lot like the Continental Hotel in John Wick. This action movie by director Lim Sang-yoon continued a long history of action films. It’s about a hitman who falls in love with a woman at the wrong time, which tests his resolve and makes his bosses want to kill him.

Action films always use this structure, and while A Company Man doesn’t break any rules, it does play all the hits through a number of fan-favorite action scenes. Most interestingly, the John Wick series adds a lot of complicated office life to its world of underground murderers. Similarly, as the title suggests, A Company Man does the same thing with its group of heartless killers.

The Man From Nowhere

It’s no surprise that South Korea makes a lot of great action thrillers, like John Wick. Another movie from 2010 that shows how much action thrillers from the country influenced the hit Keanu Reeves series is The Man From Nowhere. Lee Jeong-beom’s first action film was a huge hit in its home country of South Korea, and word of mouth has spread around the world to make it a favourite action movie.

The story of The Man From Nowhere isn’t very different from those of many other great films, like John Wick. It shows a typical mysterious loner running into a group of crooks, only for him to turn out to be an invincible killing machine with a difficult past. The Man from Nowhere, on the other hand, is a must-see for fans of the tall John Wick character because of how happily it builds up and delivers a famous action hero.

Street Kings

David Ayer, who directed The Fast and the Furious, directed Street Kings in 2008. The movie stars Keanu Reeves as John Wick, as well as Forest Whitaker, Chris Evans, and Hugh Laurie. Keanu Reeves has been in a lot of action-thriller films besides the John Wick series. Some of these films put just as much stress on martial arts. Tom Ludlow, the crooked police officer in Street Kings, is one of Reeves’s roles that is most like John Wick.

Both Ludlow and Wick are experienced killers who like fast cars. They are haunted by their many crimes and use violent acts to deal with their grief over the deaths of their wives. But Ludlow somewhat sticks to the idea of doing the right thing, which makes the fact that he found a huge plot in the LAPD an interesting puzzle.

Day Shift

Like John Wick, this terrible action-horror-comedy starring Jamie Foxx loves making up new worlds. In this case, it imagines that bloodsuckers are wreaking havoc in the San Fernando Valley, forcing a secret group of vampire hunters to work together to get rid of them. Day Shift is a typical junky Netflix show, with over-the-top action scenes and a light-hearted tone that makes us feel like we shouldn’t take any of this too seriously. It was produced by John Wick director Chad Stahelski and scored by Tyler Bates, who works with Stahelski a lot. But while Foxx and his nerdy partner Dave Franco have some funny buddy-cop moments, the movie isn’t nearly as funny or creative as John Wick. Instead, director J.J. Perry (who did stunt work on the first two Wick movies) makes a pretty standard action movie. Day Shift is good because Snoop Dogg, who plays a short-tempered hunter with a gun, does the best job.

The Mother

Netflix has been making bland action films with one or two stars for years now. The actors do things you’d see in real films, but they’re not creative or risky. Jennifer Lopez got to show off her Keanu Reeves acting skills in The Mother, where she played an unknown former assassin (She’s the Mother!) who comes in from the cold of Alaska to save her stolen child, whom she had given up for adoption years before to keep her safe. This mission has a lot of motorbike chases and sled fights that are a lot like John Wick’s over-the-top violence, but Lopez can’t get past the movie’s biggest problem, which is that you’ve seen all of this before. The Mother is an average action movie that tries to cash in on a popular style. Whale Rider director Niki Caro plays with the idea that no one is a fiercer warrior than a mum protecting her kids.

Hotel Artemis

Drew Pearce wrote and directed Hotel Artemis. Pearce would later write the screenplay for David Leitch co-directed John Wick and directed The Fall Guy. Hotel Artemis answers the question, “What if we used the mythology of the Continental hotel in John Wick but made it a hospital instead and didn’t have any good action scenes?” A cast as good as Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Bautista, and even Charlie Day and Jenny Slate has to work hard to look as lost and hopeless as they do here. Foster’s haunted but brave performance is the only thing that saves much of their honour. It seems like Hotel Artemis, like The Continental, thinks we care about the world-building in the world of John Wick as much, or even more than we care about the battle. We don’t. Without a doubt, this movie shows that.

Nobody

Sometimes it’s fun when action movies use a lead actor who doesn’t look like the normal relentless killer and make them really seem like one, like Bob Odenkirk did in Nobody. When the movie came out, Odenkirk was best known for his roles in the action-packed TV shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He had always been known as a comedic actor, though, so seeing him play a killer like John Wick with great hand-to-hand skills and a scary reputation was a lot like seeing Keanu Reeves play “Baba Yaga.”

The plot of the movie is a lot like John Wick’s. It’s about an ordinary man who goes to war with a strong Russian mob boss after getting into a fight with one of the mob boss’s young, wild cousins. But Odenkirk still gives the story a more fun tone than a movie like John Wick would allow, but that doesn’t take away from how violent it is or how creative it is. Fans of the John Wick movies are wondering if Nobody takes place in the same world because the movie is directed by David Leitch, who produced and co-directed the first John Wick movie without getting credit for it.

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Deliver Us From Evil

Don’t confuse Deliver Us from Evil with the 2014 horror film of the same name. Deliver Us from Evil is a South Korean action thriller starring Hwang Jung-min as Kim In-Nam, a tough assassin who is pulled back into his old life when he finds out that human traffickers killed his ex-girlfriend and took her daughter.

A lot of action scenes in this South Korean movie are smooth and stylish, like those in John Wick. But there’s also a surprising amount of resemblance between how Kim In-Nam and John Wick are presented. The main character is also being chased by an extremely violent yakuza killer, played by Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae. This means that John Wick fans will always have a stake in the action because the stress is always high.

Payback

Payback is a neo-noir action thriller based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, which had already been turned into the cult crime film Point Blank in 1967. It was also the directorial debut of Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and it has a lot of the same themes as the John Wick films. Fans of the strange but tightly followed rules that drive John Wick and his friends will also find the main character of Payback to be very interesting.

Porter (Mel Gibson), played by Payback, is a lot like John Wick. This is especially clear in the rougher director’s cut of the movie, where Wick goes to war with a powerful criminal group over a small amount of money ($70,000) that a disloyal former partner stole. In a distinctly neo-noir way, both Payback and the John Wick films show New York in similar ways, mixing beautiful building with dirty ruin.

Silent Night

“What would John Wick be like without him?” In 2023, Jesse Hassenger of GQ asked about the famous Hong Kong action director John Woo, who had just made his first American movie in 20 years. It was a Wick-like revenge story with an interesting plot. Brian is played by Joel Kinnaman. He is a normal guy who turns into a super-bulky warrior after gang members kill his son by accident and leave Brian deaf for life. This is an action movie with almost no speech. But, no offence to Woo, people don’t watch his movies for the talking. They watch them for the fast-paced action and balletic slow motion. Silent Night has some of that, but it’s not as groundbreaking as Woo’s other hits. You almost wish Woo would stop using such meaningless B-movie tricks—Silent Night works so hard to keep its no-talking premise—and just make his own John Wick knockoff instead. That would be the best of both worlds.

Bullet Train

Director David Leitch seemed to see Bullet Train as a way to break out of the Wick-ian straitjacket. He worked with Brad Pitt again after working with him as his action double on Fight Club. Leitch does a good job of getting out of that box, but then he gets stuck in another one. In fact, Bullet Train feels like a well-planned study of the Tarantino/Ritchie formula. It brings together a crazy group of criminals who are all on the same train, and the quick-witted conversation moves as quickly as the bullets. Pitt and other good actors, like Brian Tyree Henry, Michael Shannon, and others, try very hard to copy Pulp Fiction’s easy cool, but even the fight scenes feel like they’ve been done before. When Leitch shows off his style, it’s easy to see that he lacks depth and soul.

Kate

As a badass killer, Mary Elizabeth Winstead got her Wick on in this average action movie. She only has 24 hours to find the person who poisoned her and kill them. The visual effects artist Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, who directed the forgettable The Huntsman: Winter’s War before this, gives Kate just the right amount of grimy, neon-lit atmosphere, and Winstead does a great job with her hand-to-hand fighting. Leitch directed the movie, which was a decent Netflix filler that was held back by bad B-movie tropes. The tough main character, Kate, is stuck with a sassy young woman played by Miku Martineau, who she has to guard and grow close to. Even though Winstead is very good in the part, Kate never feels like more than a Frankenstein-like mix of familiar plot points and expected story turns. This is especially true as the movie goes on and Kate gets weaker because of the poison. As a spoiler alert, a well-known actor plays a very small supporting part, which is a clear sign that he’s more important to the story than we first think. If you don’t expect much, you might not be let down too badly.

Wrath Of Man

Jason Statham first became famous for his lead parts in early Guy Ritchie films. However, Statham hadn’t been in one of Ritchie’s films in over 15 years before he played the lead in Wrath of the Machine. The movie is a copy of the French thriller Cash Truck. It shows Ritchie’s love for scenes with lots of conversation, but it also acknowledges that Statham has become a worldwide action star since the original movie came out.

Jason Statham plays a man in Wrath of Man who goes by the name H. It’s clear that the movie is similar to John Wick because of H. Like John Wick, Wrath of Man is based on slowly showing the main character’s deadly skills and desire for revenge as he takes on a risky job as an armoured truck guard. Statham keeps up the mystery air of a very capable John Wick-like character the whole time.

The Villainess

Not only does The Villainess make a whole world of professional killers, it also has some crazy scenes that were copied by the John Wick films a few years later. On the other hand, while the 2017 South Korean movie starring Kim Ok-vin is a lot like John Wick in how well it puts together an action scene, The Villainess’ story is anything but easy.

Kim Ok-vin’s Sook-hee is a highly trained killer who goes on many missions in The Villainess. After she fakes her own death and changes her name to Chae Yeon-soo, the movie shows many flashbacks to add to her story. The same care and thought that goes into the action scenes is also used to piece together a difficult story about the main character’s many identities over many years.

Monkey Man

This is a passion project for Dev Patel. He co-wrote, directed, and stars in it as a fighter who trains to get back at the men who killed his mother and burned down his town when he was a child. These men are now some of the most powerful and evil people in India. Patel looks great as an action star, and this movie shows how good he is getting as a main man. As a movie, though, it’s strangely shapeless. It takes a long time to get going—the plot doesn’t start until more than halfway through—and Patel’s character changes from a small-time achiever to a world-destroying monster so quickly and suddenly that it has an undeniable “Oh, look, Happy can putt now” feel to it. The movie tries hard and Patel is interesting to watch, but it never quite gets away from its Netflix-bland-four-quadrant roots.

Conclusion:

These films are sure to satisfy your need for high-octane action, whether it’s the jaw-dropping fight scenes, the sleek visuals, or the revenge-driven plots. This list of films get to the heart of what makes John Wick great while also adding something new to the genre. This means that if you want more action-packed, high-stakes tales, these films are great for you.

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FAQs:

Q: Which movie is most similar to John Wick?

A: “Nobody” (2021) is arguably the closest in terms of action style and character backstory, offering a similar blend of high-paced combat and a retired assassin protagonist.

Q: Are there any more John Wick sequels coming out?

A: Yes! The John Wick franchise is expected to continue with more sequels in development.

Q: What makes John Wick a unique action film?

A: The combination of stylized gun-fu choreography, intense combat, and a deeply emotional storyline sets John Wick apart from traditional action films.

Q: Who plays John Wick, and what are his other famous roles?

A: Keanu Reeves stars as John Wick. He’s also famous for his roles in “The Matrix” trilogy, “Speed,” and “Point Break.”

Q: Are there any non-Hollywood movies similar to John Wick?

A: “The Raid: Redemption” (2011) from Indonesia is a must-watch for action fans looking for incredible martial arts sequences and high-intensity fights.