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John Wick’s action meets Foxy Brown’s retro style in the first trailer for Proud Mary

John Wick’s action meets Foxy Brown’s retro style in the first trailer for Proud Mary

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With the John Wick-esque, high-precision gun ballet now pretty much established as Hollywood’s go-to action style for characters without superpowers, Empire’s Taraji P. Henson is taking the style back to the ‘70s. In the first trailer for Proud Mary, Henson plays the title character, a hit woman working for a mob family in Boston. She’s good at what she does, but it’s not long before a job goes bad and things go crazy.

Mary, like Wick himself, is a tough-as-nails killer who seemingly needs to aim for only half a millisecond before murdering her marks with extreme prejudice. Style-wise, the movie looks like it’s borrowing from blaxploitation classics like Foxy Brown and Coffy, something that’s only accentuated by Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” blaring in the background. With that in mind, it’s definitely part of a recent trend that sees action movies like Kingsman: The Secret Service and Atomic Blonde borrowing from past eras to stand out. You can really see it in the poster, which seems to be paying homage to the legendary Pam Grier herself:

Proud Mary hits theaters on January 12th.