[3] John Woo continued to make several classic heroic bloodshed films, all featuring gun fu, and all starring leading man Chow Yun-fat.
Anthony Leong wrote of the gunfights in A Better Tomorrow,[4]Before 1986, Hong Kong cinema was firmly rooted in two genres: the martial arts film and the comedy.
Gunplay was not terribly popular because audiences had considered it boring, compared to fancy kung fu moves or graceful swordplay of wuxia epics.
There is also intimacy found in the gunplay—typically, his protagonists and antagonists will have a profound understanding of one another and will meet face-to-face, in a tense Mexican standoff where they each point their weapons at one another and trade words.Stephen Hunter, writing in The Washington Post wrote,[5]Woo saw gunfights in musical terms: His primary conceit was the shootout as dance number, with great attention paid to choreography, the movement of both actors within the frame.
The popularity of John Woo films, and the heroic bloodshed genre in general, in the U.S. helped give gun fu greater visibility.
In Equilibrium (2002), the law enforcement responsible for handling "Sense Crime" are trained in "gun kata" to gain an advantage in their raids on armed opponents.
In the 2012 film Django Unchained, the climactic shootout in Candieland is inspired by John Woo, replicating scenes from his 1989 classic The Killer shot-by-shot.
A gun fu sequence involving Chris Redfield and Glenn Arias is showcased in the 2017 CGI film Resident Evil: Vendetta.
In this game, gun fu allowed players' characters to use firearms in close combat and skilled martial artists to string together combinations of moves.
[14] In the Buffyverse role-playing games, gun fu is the name for the firearms skill, but this is more likely meant to be humorous rather than to imply characters practice an actual firearm-based martial art.
[15] In the Ninjas and Superspies supplement Mystic China, gun fu is the Triad assassin training, and is a martial arts skill that can be available to player characters.
DekaRed is specifically mentioned as a master of gun fu technique, which in the series is called as "Juu Kun Do" (jū is the Japanese word for 'gun', and the name of the style is a play on Jeet Kune Do).