"Wick Is Pain" Review

 Because I've been lackadaisical about keeping DirkFlix updated, I've never adequately surfaced my adoration for the John Wick franchise, only writing reviews for John Wick when I caught it on video and John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum theatrically (which I somehow felt it flowed better than Chapter 2 when now I feel JW2 is the best of the series) despite multiple viewings of the series.  I own them all on 4K UHD Blu-ray, I watched the so-so Peacock series The Continental which was a Winston origin story and made a rare trip to the theaters again for the spinoff Ballerina.

The new standard they've set for action films is something I mercilessly hold against movies which still trade in the old shaky-cam and edit fu techniques to obscure the fact the performers aren't very good at fighting or the mistaken belief that SHAKY! = ENERGY FUN! The Paul Greengrass school of action as typified in his The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum sequels is out, the John Wick style is in or should be.

But how did John Wick arise to conquer action cinema? That's the question answered in the feature length documentary Wick Is Pain, which is a mantra that director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves have for the brutal physical toll these movies take on everyone involved.

It introduces us to the directorial tag-team of Stahelski and David Leitch (The Fall Guy, Deadpool 2) and how they came up together as stuntmen and fight choreographers in the 1990s. Stahelski was a good friend and training partner of Brandon Lee's and when Lee was killed by an accidental shooting while filming The Crow in 1993, Stahelski came in to be Lee's body double for the final two weeks of shooting, either being filmed from behind or having Lee's face superimposed over Stahelski's body. Another big break came when he was Reeves key stunt double for The Matrix.

The pair founded 87Eleven, an "action design" company that provided complete services to Hollywood from fight choreography and pre-viz to training the stunt performers and doing 2nd unit direction. Their backgrounds in martial arts allowed them to ride the wave of change from old style stunts to wire-assisted Hong Kong style work as done by action legend Yuen Woo-ping, who did The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Looking to transition into directing they found a script by Derek Kolstad called Scorn about a retired hitman whose wife died and the puppy she'd left him was killed. Initially intended for a Paul Newman type (Newman died in 2008, so weird pick), they realized the action would require a younger star in his 50s. They rapidly settled on Reeves, who was also looking to get back into action after nearly a decade of non-action movies since 2005's Constantine. He was in the process of finishing 47 Ronin and his directorial debut, Man of Tai Chi, but when both flopped, his star power was dimming and there wasn't a ton of enthusiasm from the studio, Lionsgate, to invest too heavily in this rookie effort by two stunt guys starring a washed-up actor and oh my God, do you have to kill the puppy?!?

The production was so fraught that it almost collapsed days before shooting was to begin when the financing fell apart. They were facing trying to cut $6.5 million from the budget (impossible) and it was almost scrapped, which would triggered lawsuits from everyone against them, until the most unlikely angel investor - Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria! - swooped in with the cash (and got a producers credit) to save the day. They didn't tell Reeves who'd bailed them out until they'd finished.

Even with the money, the troubles didn't relent. Stahelski's marriage to stuntwoman Heidi Moneymaker (who is Scarlet Johansson's double) was crumbling and the partnership with Leith (who wasn't credited as director) was getting tense. Lots of "Mom and Dad are fighting" vibes on the set. Concerned that they wouldn't be taken seriously as storytellers they spend nine days shooting Keanu moping around his house, burning two days to film him doing bookbinding repairs. The dailies were boring and the assembly cut was a disaster. (To be fair, Martin Scorsese has mentioned that if a filmmaker does not feel physically ill when watching their first cut, then something might be wrong.)

When they finally sorted things out, no one wanted to pick up the distribution rights. Finally, Lionsgate took them just because otherwise it'd get dumped direct to video. But in a stroke of luck, Kingsman: The Secret Service moved its release date from October 2014 to early-2015 opening a date for John Wick. As an extra bonus, Fantastic Fest was just before that date so they held a screening to the prime target audience of the film which resulted in rave reviews and tons of social media hype.

After becoming a sleeper hit, Lionsgate knew that they needed to get a John Wick 2 rolling as fast as possible, but they didn't have an idea for a story beyond expanding the universe somehow and going to Rome. The timing was poor for the duo to launch into the sequel because Leitch was ready to go with a movie called The Coldest City (which would become Atomic Blonde, his best movie) so the decision to go their separate ways was made, leaving Stahelski to shepherd the rapidly expanding John Wick franchise while Leitch made so-so movies consistently hampered by his inability to manage tone while having terrific action.

The rest of the series is covered with plenty of behind-the-scenes footage from the productions along with interviews and Reeves and Stahelski together, watching clips from the movies and discussing the challenges of shooting things. Reeves fanatical dedication to training often bumps into the fact that as a 50-something man who's got a lot of miles on his body - if you've ever seen BTS footage from the first Matrix you've seen Reeves wearing a neck brace after spinal fusion doing his training - to the point where if you seen John Wick limping in pain, that's not acting.

As a junkie for making-of stuff, it's cool how they explain developments in the tech where they went from using Airsoft guns with digital muzzle flashes and shell casings (which they hated) to what are called full-block guns where the barrel is plugged so nothing comes out of the barrel - even blanks can deliver lethal force out of the business end as Jon-Erik Hexum learned the hard way - and low-powered blanks cycle the action, eject brass, and make bangs that help the stuntmen cue their actions.

The way the series success allowed for even bigger set pieces, location shots - there's a funny sidebar about how shooting JW3 in Morocco was a hassle because it was a fishing town with tons of stray cats all over who'd wander onto the set and they had to save them from being eaten by Halle Berry's attack dogs - casting (like Berry or Donnie Yen) is covered, all driven by Stahelski and Reeves desire to tell a compelling story in spectacular fashion.

Wick Is Pain walks the line between being an "Oh boy, aren't we so awesome? We're the best!" puff piece and a warts-and-all expose of the grueling amount of work it takes to execute these films. While the details about how miraculous the production of the first film was, subsequent entries get diminishing coverage with little in the way of details like how the Dragon's Breathe shotgun ammo top-view scene was done. For someone like me, the lack of depth made it less useful, though to be fair the individual releases covered these topics.

While it's priced at $10 to buy, it feels overpriced for the actual content. If it shows up on a streaming service and you're a fan, it's a fun, if slight, watch which will inform how the carnage gets made.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Final Destination Bloodlines" Review

 Considering Hollyweird is (usually) all about making money and horror films are the most consistently profitable genre because they are typically inexpensive to make due to no big stars, low budgets, and decent box office, it's odd to realize that it's been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie -   Final Destination 5 - which ended the run of five movies between 2000 and 2011 which featured an unstoppable "villain" in the form of Death itself and sometimes absolutely bonkers Rube Goldberg machine death scenes. (No one who's seen Final Destination 2 will ever drive behind a log hauler.) Well, Death is back from holiday with Final Destination Bloodlines, which takes the familiar dog and teaches it a few new tricks.

It opens with the traditional elaborate disaster premonition scene set in 1968 at the opening of the Sky View restaurant atop a tower which is meant to evoke Seattle's Space Needle. We meet young Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger, Stargirl), who has been brought there by her boyfriend as a surprise and also to propose. No thanks to a bratty kid tossing the unluckiest penny ever off the open air observation deck, a wild chain reaction of events leads to the explosion and collapse of the tower, killing everyone including Iris.

Usually in the series, the person who foresees disaster then intervenes to halt things, but here we jump to Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she wakes up screaming in her college math class. Unable to sleep for the past two months as she's constantly tormented by the visions of the Sky View disaster, her grades have suffered to the point she's on academic probation, at risk of losing her scholarship. She believes the visions are related to her grandmother, so goes home to ask her father, Marty (Tinpo Lee), about grandma.

It's a sore point for him because his wife, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), Stefani and her brother Charlie's (Teo Briones) mother, had left the family when Stefani was 10 because of how Iris had raised her and Stefani's uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and he forbids her to seek Grandma out. So she tries Uncle Howard who always waves her off because of how his mother had seemingly gone nuts over this premonition. However her aunt tips her as to where she could locate Iris.

Stefani goes to her place in the woods and finds it's a walled fortress that makes Laurie Strode's place in Halloween (2018, unreviewed, 5/10 - catch on cable/streaming) look like a city park. Old Iris (Gabrielle Rose), has been cheating Death by staying locked in there, never stepping outside, for years. She explains her premonition and we then see the usual prevention of disaster, but explains that Death will not be denied and not only has it been killing all the people who should've died that night, but also their descendants who never would've been born.

She's compiled a book full of scrawled notes and clippings documenting the past six decades of carnage, but Stefani refuses to believe the crazy until Iris, who now has terminal cancer, demonstrates by stepping out of her cabin and is promptly killed in spectacularly gory fashion. NOW Stefani believes! But when she tries to explain the theory to her family - that Death has been systematically reaping the survivors and descendants in order of when they died in the premonition then by order of birth, and that Uncle Howard and his four kids would be next followed by Darlene, Stefani and Charlie (spouses are exempt) - they think she's caught a case of the crazies until Howard is killed in a bizarre gardening accident.

When Darlene rolls into town in her Winnebago, her home now, for her brother's funeral, Stefani is naturally chilly to bad mom, but allows her to join the kids' ersatz Scooby Gang as they try to use Iris's book of clues to find a way to beat Death which leads them to recurring franchise character William Bludworth (Tony Todd, in his last performance before passing in December 2024, less than a year after filming) who is also dying of cancer. He explains that the only way to stop Death is to either kill and take the remaining years of the victim or die and they get revived. Attempts to do the latter go about as well as you'd expect.

I've been a casual fan of the Final Destination series since the beginning, really appreciating the whole Death conceit as an invisible force orchestrating ridiculous accidents as opposed to a Freddie or Jason or Leatherface with metal claws/machete/chainsaw. (No one cosplays as "Death from Final Destination.") But by the third entry, I found the setups too obviously telegraphed, and I think I skipped the 4th installment (The Final Destination). But the fifth film with its epic North Bay Bridge collapse sequence and the closing whammy revealing it was a pseudo-prequel to the first was a winner.

Though I own the other movies on Blu-ray, we didn't rewatch them ahead of Bloodlines, so I'd forgotten about some of the rules (like the kill to steal time one), but it's not important for this soft relaunch of the series. Overall, it's an OK entry in the series with a good amount of "OOOOOH!!!!" kill moments which if we're being honest is why we watch these movies. The unfamiliarity wish most of the cast helps keep the tension up because no one has the plot armor of being the Big Star.

The writers are an eclectic mix with Jon Watts, director of the MCU Spider-Man films, contributing to the story and Guy Busick, who's co-written the Scream series reboots as well as the above-average Ready Or Not (7/10) and Abigail (7/10), but it's not as elevated as those movies. Directorial team Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein step into the Big Leagues here and do well staging the action. Some of the visual effects are a bit obvious, but they're mostly good.

Final Destination Bloodlines grossed $280M on a $50M budget, so it's highly likely a sequel will be forthcoming sooner than 2039. As long as they can keep the quality up - storywise as well as inventive kills - Death is welcome to do his thing.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.

"Thank You Very Much" Review

The short, weird life of weird "anti-comic" comedian(?) Andy Kaufman is explored superficially in Thank You Very Much, which was the signature line of his Foreign Man character which he parlayed into the role of Latka Gravas on Taxi for five seasons between 1978 thru 1983, ending a year before his shocking death of lung cancer at age 35; shocking because he didn't smoke or drink, was a vegetarian, and practiced Transcendental Meditation.

With loads of archival footage, the documentary recaps his outlandish shtick where he always seemed to be "on" and constantly riding the line between amusing and bemusing as he'd read from The Great Gatsby for HOURS during his performances. His unsuccessful audition for Saturday Night Live is shown and while he didn't make the cast, he was invited to perform bits from his act throughout the show's first season including the debut show where he did the Mighty Mouse theme bit where he stands there playing the record, only moving to lipsynch along with the "Here I come to save the day!" chorus.

Interspersed with the footage are reminiscences from admirers like Steve Martin (a fellow anti-comedian who didn't tell jokes per se); contemporaries like SNL boss Lorne Michaels; Taxi cast mates Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner; his girlfriend and other friends including performance artist Laurie Anderson, who spoke of her times with Kaufman in a piece on her The Ugly One with the Jewels album; and most importantly, yet frustratingly, his best friend and writer, Bob Zmuda, who'd be an accomplice in some of his put-on bits.

The frustration comes from fact that Zmuda never goes into discussing how they came up with Kaufman's stunts. Want a theory about how his parents lying about his grandfather's death traumatized him so much that it warped his entire pysche? Thank You Very Much has you covered. Want to hear about how he developed the grotesque Vegas lounge lizard character Tony Clifton or how Zmuda would collaborate in confusing whether Kaufman was Clifton under all the prosthetic makeup by donning the Clifton guise so he and Andy would be seen together? Nope.

 While his foray into being a wrestling heel, challenging women to fight him, culminating in pro wrestler Jerry Lawler slapping him out of his chair on Late Night with David Letterman, they don't reveal that the altercation was staged. With Kaufman dead over 40 years now....or is he?.....what's the point of keeping the secrets? I shouldn't know more about a documentary subject simply by virtue of being old enough to have lived through his brief heyday.

While Thank You Very Much is a tidy primer on Andy Kaufman's brief and idiosyncratic life which will clue in those too young to remember him or wish to use it as an addendum to the 1999 Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon or the 2017 Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond which covered how Jim Carrey drove everyone crazy being full metal Method in his channeling of Kaufman for Man on the Moon. But those seeking deep insight or tales of how and or why he did what he did will have to settle for Lucy Van Pelt-grade psychoanalysis of what may've been an unknowable man.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Hoopla.)

"Mountainhead" Review

If you like your men behaving very badly and correctly believe Network is a documentary and American Psycho is a comedy, then the new HBO/Max Original film Mountainhead is here to reinforce your fears of gazillionaire tech bros and the generative AI deepfake world we're plummeting into.

Hugo "Souper" Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore) has invited his three besties - collectively known as the "Brewsters" for never-explained reasons - to his new 21,000 sq ft, 7-bedroom mountain mansion outside of Park City, UT called Mountainhead (roll credits!) for a no stress, no deals, brofest weekend. Coming are Venis "Ven" Paris (Cory Michael Smith, May December), the owner of a web company called Traam (think Hooli if you're a Silicon Valley fan) and the Richest Man in the World; Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef, Ramy), owner of AI company Bilter; and Randall Garrett (Steve Carell, Anchorman), a venture capitalist who helped the other startups in addition to running a company that sounds patterned after Peter Thiel's Palantir.

 Hugo's nickname "Souper" is because at only a half-billion dollars net worth (approximately 1/460th of Ven's tally) coming from a meditation app makes him the "poorest" and thus closest to needing alms from a soup kitchen and the not-so-subtle hazing of the shortest member of the quartet begins as they diss Mountainhead with slights like, "Is that supposed to be like The Fountainhead? Who was your decorator, Ayn BLAND?" They snowmobile and hike to a mountain peak where they write their net worth on their chests, don hats symbolizing their rank - Ven (crown), Randall (captain's hat), Jeff (sailor hat), Hugo (soup ladle on a chain) - then shout their wishes into the void.

The casual intentions of weekend are interrupted by constant news alerts on their phones about the unrest sweeping the world as generative AI tools released by Traam are being used to create fake videos of atrocities which are then sparking very real and lethal reprisals as tribal groups seeking payback respond to the fake videos. As death tolls rise, Ven doesn't seem particularly bothered by the fallout, saying that it's just a rough patch and that good content will drown out the bad. (As Tony Stark said, "Not a great plan.")

However, a solution exists as Jeff's AI tools could be used to detect and expose the deepfake videos being used to propagandize and radicalize people to violence. Ven wants to buy Bilter to integrate its fact-checking AI tools so he doesn't have to roll back the new features (nor take responsibility for what it's wrought), but Jeff doesn't want his creation subsumed into Traam. Unknown to the others, Randall wants the merger to happen because he's been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and believes that Ven is on the cusp of launching a transhumanist epoch where he will be able to be uploaded and live forever in The Matrix, so to speak.

As the world's governments begin to falter, the three who aren't Jeff decide this would be a perfect time to overthrown the Old World Order and install themselves as the oligarchs of a global technocracy powered up their tech companies endless reach into governments, militaries, power grids, etc. Realizing that taking over the world at once may be too much, they decide to start small with Randall launches a rolling brownout in Belgium and Zoom conferences with Argentina to discuss being taken over by them beginning.

While this goes on Jeff is worried about his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson, Little Women) who has gone on to Mexico for what he calls "a sex party" but she retorts isn't that but "a party where people have sex." While he's troubled by the chaos, he still won't sell to Ven and when Randall fears his life as the Lawnmower Man is at risk, he proposes to the others that they kill Jeff because he's messing up their plans. Because morality doesn't exist in this dojo, they all agree, but because being a megawealthy tech broligarch doesn't necessarily come with competent murder skills, it devolves into farce.

 If this all feels ripped from the headlines it's because writer-director Jesse Armstrong (creator of Succession) only began writing the script in January 2025, filming for five weeks in March, and getting it finished and on HBO Max by May 31, 2025. However, it's to his great credit that he doesn't indulge in what 99% of Hollyweird would've done in their current rage state over the peasants voting incorrectly and make it into an obvious bash of Elon Musk and the Bad Orange Man. 

While there are some similarities to real people if you know who's who in the techocratic elite space, Armstrong chooses to craft a more general tale of wealthy male fear (a la David Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross) and ego, the risks of unchecked AI, the self-anointed regard techno bros have over the rabble, while leavening it with farcical attempts at violence and how even when your best friends try to murder you, you can move past it if there's a buck to be made. His dialog doesn't stop to Basil Exposition anything for the non-nerds so you either keep up with the rapid-fire or get left behind. He trusts the audience to follow enough to understand the base emotions fueling the characters.

The performances are all strong from deft comic performers, especially Carell who's Randall could be seen as a brother to his role in The Big Short which was criminally denied an Oscar nomination. I'm not familiar with Youssef or Smith (though he was Chevy Chase in Saturday Night), but they're good as well. Schwartzman, of course, can play these weasels in his sleep.

Perhaps a more deliberately developed (read: not filmed shortly after writing) script could've honed Mountainhead's intentions to a finer, deeper-cutting edge though the rapidly evolving capabilities of generative AI may've left whatever more time in scripting in the dust. Just last month Google unveiled their new Gemini AI video tool powered by Veo3 and it's capable of producing video with audio, sound effects, camera movement, etc. like this:

Sure, it has some jankiness like the text on the signs at the rally being gibberish, BUT what happens in 2028 when a video showing "[Disfavored Politician] BUSTED Drowning Puppies While Shouting 'I LOVE NICKELBACK!'" pops up on teh Intartoobz a month before the Election and it's amplified by corrupt legacy media outlets who eagerly covered up the last President's senility & family corruption. How will we be able to trust what we're shown anymore and who is going to get even richer and more powerful while having fun running the corps which will generate and disseminate these fabrications? While Mountainhead doesn't have those answers, it is willing to posit the question, albeit in the guise of a bro comic farce.

Score: 7/10. Watch it on HBO Max.

"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.

"Freaky Tales" Review

 For their first movie since 2019's MCU mediocrity Captain Marvel, tag-team filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are back with Freaky Tales, a period anthology dramedy that manages to be even more mediocre. Consisting of four tangentially related short stories set in the same time frame of June 1987 in Oakland, CA they manage to add up to a overall story less than their parts.

The first segment - "Strength in Numbers: The Gilman Strikes Back" - is set at the infamous punk club which spawned Green Day as Nazi thugs storm the club during an Operation Ivy show, destroying equipment and beating up fans. The next day the punks decide to defend themselves and when the Nazis return for round 2, they're are beaten in a stylized ultraviolent rumble. That's it.

The next segment - "Don't Fight the Feeling" - centers on a pair of female rappers, Entice (Normani from girl group Fifth Harmony) and Barbie (Dominique Thorne, the upcoming Ironheart), who are invited to a club date for local rap icon Too Short (rapper Demario "Symba" Driver) to participate in a rap battle. They win. That's it.

The third segment - "Born to Mack" - is longer and darker in tone as we meet Clint (Pedro Pascal, AGAIN), an underworld enforcer who is seeking to get out of the game as he does "one last job" collecting from a deadbeat at a poker game in the back of a video store. In the one inspired moment of the whole movie, he gets stuck in a discussion of movies with the store's owner, played by the least expected actor. (I shant spoil the surprise in case you still want to watch this.) Tragedy befalls Clint as his pregnant wife is shot to death, but even then his gang won't let him go.

The final segment - "The Legend of Sleepy Floyd" - brings back their Nazis and their leader's father, The Guy (Ben Mendelsohn, a frequent Boden/Fleck collaborator), as he is orchestrating multiple robberies of Golden State Warriors players during a NBA Championship game. Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis), an actual Warriors player who was on that year's All-Star Team, has a record-setting night, but because his mother wasn't feeling well and had left the game early with his girlfriend and another, arriving at Sleepy's home and surprising the burglars, who then shoot them, it's not a great evening to remember.

A pair of punks from Gilman Street happened to overhear Clint discuss the crimes at a restaurant and tell Floyd about the connection to the Nazis, so Floyd does what any grieving man would do: Straps up with all sorts of ninja weapons and kills everyone with the power of meditation and kung fu.

There's a charming lo-fi retro vibe to the cinematography - the first segment is shot in 4:3 before going widescreen for the rest - and there are moments where you can tell they're paying homage to Eighties cult movies like Repo Man with a bit of Pulp Fiction thrown in, but the conceit of the stories being interconnect is too tenuous.

The first two segments are so superfluous to the rest it's questionable as to why they're included. It feels like Boden/Fleck had four scraps of ideas they couldn't make into full movies, so tossed them together. As I'm writing this, it occurred to me that if they had intercut the stories together it may've hidden the sparseness of the weaker segments. Frankly, if the first two disappeared and the last two, which are more interrelated, were one story, it'd be best, though not particularly good.

 It also relies too much on Easter eggs like recognizing that The Guy's cop partner is the real Too Short (who also narrates the movie) and that the bearded bald guy who gives a testimonial for Sleepy Floyd's meditation course is Tim Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid. Get it? They were the punk band in the first part! Awesome! Ahem...

 Boden/Fleck have been critic's darlings for two decades with their first movies, Half Nelson (which starred Ryan Gosling) and Sugar, getting lots of flowers. But nothing else they've done has landed commercially except for Captain Marvel which allows Boden to claim the title of First Woman To Direct a Live Action Movie That Grossed $1 Billion as if she didn't have a male co-director and the plum release date a month before Avengers: Endgame with the hype that this was a must-see movie to prep for that. (If you held a rabid badger against the privates of even fairly nerdy MCU fans and demanded they name who directed Captain Marvel, you'd have a lot of sad fans and overfed badgers as "some art house team" wasn't sufficient an answer.)

While there are a few moments in Freaky Tales that almost make it a so-so watch, it really didn't do much for me, barely avoiding a Skip It recommendation. 

Score: 4.5/10. Catch it on streaming/cable.