"Ballerina" Review

 

I love the John Wick franchise. Love it. Even the lesser installments blow the doors off of pretty much everything else in the action genre. Sure, the mythology has grown a bit ridiculous at times, but the action continually breaks ground and I ding movies who still traffic in the pre-John Wick era shaky-cam and edit-fu shenanigans when the paradigm has shifted to long take clear coverage. I've been sloppy about getting them all reviewed despite all the times I've watched them, but here is the one other review I posted for John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. Even the scores tend to have gone up on subsequent viewings with the series averaging 8/10. The fact I've bought all four movies on 4K UHD Blu-ray after getting two on digital 4K says a lot.

So it was with great anticipation I've waited for Ballerina - or as the posters have it, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina - because Ballerina on its own isn't a super memorable title. And waited. And waited some more. From when it was announced in April 2022, there's been enough time that a Netflix Original, a South Korean import also entitled Ballerina arrived in October 2023 to presumably steal some attention from people thinking it was the John Wick spinoff. (I never wrote the review, but it scored a 4/10, Skip it.) Then it was announced its 2024 release date was being pushed back a full year so that John Wick director Chad Stahelski could shoot some additional action scenes to kick it up a notch. (So long ago this began filming, Lance Reddick makes his final screen appearance as Charon, the concierge at the Continental, when he passed away in March 2023, just a week before John Wick 4 came out, making his on-screen death even more poignant.)

Some claim that most of the film was reshot over 2-3 months, which is denied by Stahelski and credited director Len Wiseman - making his first feature since 2012's Total Recall remake which looked terrific, but lacked Mars for some reason - who insist it was just a couple of weeks of additional work. Whatever the facts, it's here and has been blessed with the honor of getting the missus and I to actually go to a theater to see it; our first theatrical visit since Deadpool & Wolverine in August 2024. (Coincidentally, the previous time we went to a show was in April 2023 for John Wick: Chapter 4, one of only seven times I've gone to the movies since the world ended in March 2020.) 

 If you wondered what the deal was with the tattooed ballerinas glimpsed in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum when John went to the Director (Angelica Huston) of the Ruska Roma to get passage out of New York City after becoming excommunicado, you're in luck because Ballerina overlaps with the events of that movie.

After an opening scene where a young Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte) witnesses her father (David Castañeda, The Umbrella Academy) murdered by men led by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, The Usual Suspects), the orphaned girl is taken by Winston Scott (Ian McShane), manager of the NYC Continental hotel for assassins, to meet the Director to see if she has a place to grow and train.

Of course she does and 12 years later she's Ana de Armas, doing an extended training montage of getting better at dancing and fighting like a girl to compensate for the natural size and strength advantages men have over 5'6" women. She graduates into becoming a Kikimora assassin/bodyguard after completing a protection assignment, barely. She then goes into the murder-for-hire business and after completing a gig, she is attacked by a member of the Cult which the Chancellor leads, indicated by an X brand on their wrist.

Eve demands the Director tell her where the Cult is hiding, but the Director refuses to permit her vendetta. So Eve goes rogue, traveling to Austria on the hunt for the Cult's location in the Austrian Alps town of Hallstatt. Along the way, she makes a pit stop at the Vienna Continental where she stumbles into a situation involving a Cult member, Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus, The Walking Dead), who is attempting to escape with his daughter, which echos Eve's situation with her own father.

As she closes in, the Chancellor contacts the Director to demand she leash her attack kitten or else it will be war between the Cult and Ruska Roma. Who do you send after a woman on a mission? Why the Baba Yaga himself, John Wick (Keanu Reeves, the Bill & Ted series)! Does he stop her? Does she stop him? Does the action ever stop? The answers to all three are various meanings of "Duh!"

While the production may or may not have been troubled, if you didn't know the inside baseball of it there's little to indicate problems. I have routinely praised Stahelski for doing with the John Wick series what his co-director on the first film, David Leitch, has struggled to manage, namely balancing the tone of his films, especially action comedies like Bullet Train (3.5/10, Skip it) and The Fall Guy (5/10, Catch on cable/streaming) and in the latter's review I run down his career, literally. But the credited director Wiseman is no slouch having helmed the first two hot kickass vampire chick flicks of the Underworld series, Live Free or Die Hard (the 4th one where John McClane becomes a superhero at times), and even the flawed Total Recall had clear and kinetic action sequences. Perhaps I could pick out which scenes each shot, but that's just flyspecking.

The bigger problem is the thinness of the script. I'm not demanding Shakespeare from my Unstoppable Killing Machine Revenge Flick or even a fraction of mythos of the Wick world - the first one's logline could've been, "Guy kills a retired assassin's puppy and the assassin murders everyone in return" - but whereas the Wick films deftly sketch the world in brilliant show-don't-tell detail (e.g. what is the deal with the call center with the tattooed Fifties-style women and primitive tech handling the contracts?!?), Ballerina relies on familiarity with the series to understand most of the references & callbacks to the world like the Chapter 3 moments or Chapter 2's "sommelier" weapons dealer scene.  

"Young woman becomes assassin to avenge her father's murder" is succinct, but the script by Shay Hatten - who I see wrote it as a spec which Lionsgate bought in 2017 and led to his becoming a co-writer on Chapters 3 & 4 - doesn't really flesh it out with much of a character arc for Eve. (He also co-wrote Zak Snyder's recent tear of bad Netflix movies including Army of the Dead and the catastrophically terribad Rebel Moon movies, soooooooooo make of that what you will.)

Sadly lacking as well is de Armas. I've liked her since she first appeared on my radar in Knock Knock (5/10. Cable/streaming; co-starring Keanu Reeves!) and subsequent appearances in Blade Runner 2049 and others and I was hoping she'd join the elite ranks of beautiful, talented actresses who are also plausible action heroines like Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron and, to a lesser extent, Halle Berry or Milla Jovovich - I omit Scarlet Johansson because her stunt doubles do so much of her action -  but while she fights well, her performance lacks the simmering fury that would fuel her revenge quest. I heard someone say that if this was made 10 years ago it would've starred Theron and she would've killed it and that's about right. Amazingly, at age 35 when filmed, she looks about 22 and plays it about the same. It's not bad, but it doesn't quite work.

Reeve's Wick is more of an extended cameo, but it's good though it does raise questions as to why he'd be called in by the tribe who wanted nothing to do with him earlier in the movie? 

 So the script is thin and the star is disappointing. How's the action then? A: BONKERS! It is a John Wick movie after all and the fight choreographer and stunt performers pull off a variety of unique combat scenarios culminating in a flamethrower fight that had me laughing out loud at how ridonkulous it was in a good way. However, there are a few kills with hand grenades that should've blowed her up real good as well or had her much more banged up. Even when stabbed and beaten, the worst injury she shows is a dainty facial cut with a little blood. Compared to Atomic Blonde (which we watched when we got home) where Theron gets whupped down hard and has black eyes and bruises all over to show for it, this is Disney.

While Ballerina is clearly a step down from the top shelf John Wick films, it does an OK job at not damaging the franchise's reputation, unlike the so-so The Continental TV series which never really caught fire. If you're a fan, it's worth catching a matinee at the theater for the heavy sound - we saw it in Laser Ultra (a Dolby Cinema knockoff) with Atmos sound - but for more causal fans, it can wait for streaming.

Score: 6.5/10. Catch a matinee if you're a big John Wick fan, otherwise catch it on cable/streaming.