"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.

"A Working Man" Review

 Just a year after the sleeper hit of The Beekeeper, director David Ayer and star Jason Statham are back with A Working Man, based on Levon's Trade, one of a series of novels by comic book writer Chuck Dixon. While The Beekeeper was a bonkers mess while being entertaining, this time we're given a bog-standard revenge flick which while it knocked off Disney's disastrous Sand Brown Snow White in the box office in its second week, it won't be remembered in Statham's Pantheon of action classics.

 Statham plays Levon Cade, a grumpy ex-Royal Marines commando working as a construction foreman for Joe Garcia (Michael Peña) in Chicago. He has a young daughter, Merry (Isla Gie), who lives with her grandfather, Dr. Jordan Roth (Richard Heap), who blames Levon for his daughter unaliving herself after a lifelong battle with depression. He is seeking to further restrict Levon's limited visitation time because he has PTSD & is a violent killer, though that's what soldiers do in war.

During an evening of clubbing with friends, Joe's daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) is kidnapped. Joe begs Levon to help, offering $70,000, but Levon demurs saying he's not that person anymore. But after about five minutes and a visit to a blind war buddy, Gunny (David Harbour), he changes his mind and embarks on the quest to find Jenny, working his way through Russian mobsters and various underworld lowlifes.

If you've seen any Unstoppable Killing Machine On A Revenge Mission movies, you can pretty much guess how A Working Man goes on its discount Taken plotline. The problem is that the script by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone (whose producer credit indicates he was developing this for himself) is in need of heavy editing and streamlining to pick up the pace. We are separated from Jenny for so long at times we almost forget what Levon is after.

The way he tries to pick up the trail by dealing with biker meth dealers slows the pace. He calls another war buddy who works at the DEA for some info and we never hear from him again. An opening scene where armed thugs rough up a worker at the construction site and Levon steps in to deal the hurt has zero ramifications. And the ending seems like it wants to set up a sequel of some sorts when there's little left to this story. Even the introduction of the grandfather dressed like a Jamiroquai cosplayer isn't explained and how that allows him to look down on Levon.

Statham is Statham in pretty much every Statham movie - grumpy bald Brit with hints of a soft center under his iron fists. At 57, he's beginning to slow down - he was 34 when he shot The Transporter and his peak heyday was in the Aughts. It doesn't help that Ayer covers the action with too close framing and reliance on shakycam. After John Wick revolutionized action coverage, there's no excuse for poor fight work.

 To be punny, A Working Man is a workmanlike movie. Not bad, but not as good as it could've been with substantial tightening and a sharper focus. With a dozen novels so far in the Levon Cade series, they'd clearly like to make a franchise of this, but they'll have to get better quickly to succeed.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Dominique" 4K Review

Here's how Dominique opens: We see a Jeep with three Colombian men driving through the jungle, arriving at a crashed small airplane. They open the hatch and spy a large crate bound with chains, so lug it outside. One of them goes to investigate the pilot and finds a blonde woman inert at the controls, unconscious or dead. He notices her cleavage in a gratuitous closeup and begins to fondle her because oink. He then notices hundred dollar bills tucked under her clothing and pulls out a knife to cut her seatbelt off when to the surprise of no one, she awakes, snatches the knife from him and stabs him repeatedly, spraying blood all over the cockpit window and her. She then goes outside and whacks the other two men, taking their truck, burying the crate and heading into town. Alrightee then!

That's our introduction to the titular character played by Ukrainian-Scandanavian actress Oksana Orlan (more about how you haven't heard of her either later), so we're clearly in for some grindhouse antics. She goes to a bar where a middle-aged Amazonian blonde (she's 5'11") chugging tequila doesn't really blend in. A local, Julio (Sebastián Carvajal), introduces himself and she clearly takes a liking to him because she's immediately back at his place, having her way with him. (Grrrl Powah! Girls on top!)

The morning after, she discovers he's a local policeman when he puts on his uniform, but he leaves this woman whom he'd just met and boinked home to hang out with his very pregnant sister, her two kids, and his elderly wheelchair-bound father, while he goes to work for the exceedingly corrupt police Chief Santiago (Maurice Compte, Narcos), who uses the police as an army for the local cartel boss. But Julio is the One Good Cop and meets with an Internal Affairs officer to provide video evidence of the atrocities being committed only to learn the hard way the the cop cops are also corrupt and it ends very badly for him.

 Santiago sends a half-dozen cops to get the laptop with the original files from the home, but Dominique kills them all. He them parlays with her, telling her that if she gives him the laptop that night, he'll spare Julio's family. Knowing that's a lie, she fortifies the home and lots of killy hijinks ensue.

 Now I'm a fan of revenge flicks and hot kickass women kicking ass, so why am I giving Dominique a Skip It? To explain requires massive spoilers, so let me run down what sorta works first.

When the trailer for this arrived, looking like "female John Wick meets Desperado" I looked it up on IMDB and was puzzled why this movie even existed considering it has zero stars - the closest to a recognizable face is Compte who has a bunch of TV series credits - and Orlan's IMDB page's most recognizable past projects were 2005's xXx: State of the Union (the one with Ice Cube instead of Vin Diesel) where she played the uncredited Trophy Wife and Michael Bay's The Island where she was the uncredited Rich Woman. And also she's now 51-years-old.

Alright, so you have a middle-aged former model with almost no prior roles of note who looks a lot like Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon and an exhibited acting range similar to Keanu Reeves (not that these roles require a ton of emoting). Perhaps the director/writer/editor Michael S. Ojeda is someone? Scanning his IMDB......annnnnd nope, nothing much except 20 episodes as a "recreations director" for a show called Deadliest Warrior which took the question of "Who would win a fight between Jesse James and Al Capone or Vlad the Impaler versus Sun Tzu?" and made a show of it.

However, he does have two relevant listings: First a direct-to-video thing called The Russian Bride which starred Orlan as, well, duh, mail-ordered by evil billionaire Corbin Bernsen and a short film called Rise of the Phoenix where Orlan starred as a woman named...wait for it...Dominique. This was made in 2015 and clearly was the demo reel to get the feature funded. Orlan is co-credited with coming up with the story so it's like Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman's collaboration creating The Bride for the Kill Bill films if you ordered from Temu.

 So, is Ojeda a pulp grindhouse visionary or something? Not that Dominique indicates. He has a jittery handheld aesthetic that reminded me of Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi in its rawness and the story and execution of the action scenes is adequate for the caliber of the production this is.

But where it all goes wrong requires spoiling the ending, so if you're still down for a lean and mean low budget revenge action flick that will leave you angry at the end, go for it. It was riding a 5/10, Catch It On Streaming review until the end so perhaps you can overcome it.

But for the rest of you, SPOILERS BEGIN NOW:

After surviving the massive attack with the grandfather and oldest daughter's boyfriend catching some death, Dominque takes the sister, her newborn baby (who arrived during the battle after about 10 minutes of labor), and the other two children into the countryside to meet up with a kindly doctor who is waiting for them with an ambulance to transport them to safety far from this town. Everything looks hunky dory until the doctor is killed by a sniper and it's revealed the cartel had the rendezvous staked out. In the ensuing mayhem, everyone in the family is killed, even the newborn.

What. The. F*CK?!?!?

Earlier in the movie, Dominique explains that the only reason she's staying to defend the family of her one-night stand was, "I don't like when people die for no good reason." Um, HELLO?!?!? What would you call that ending, Mr. Ojeda?!?!? No, the fact you show the aftermath of her killing all the cartel members during the end credits doesn't make it better and if you thought you were launching a series off this movie, hooooo boy, no no no no NOOOOOOO!!!!

For all his evil-doing, you have to credit Harvey Weinstein for making a condition of releasing Clerks be that the original ending where Dante is murdered by a robber be cut. He understood that after all the wacky fun of this comedy, killing the poor guy who wasn't even supposed to be working that day would be commercial suicide, thus saving Kevin Smith from his own post-ironic stupidity. Too bad no one told Ojeda that killing children wasn't a winning move.

That's not to say that downbeat endings can't work. Leon doesn't make it out alive at the end of Leon: The Professional, but his death has meaning. This is just senseless shock.

END SPOILERS.

As for the 4K HDR presentation, it's not very effective as the low-budget cinematography is frequently blown out and generally flat. Looks more like Blu-ray quality which is fine for the material. 

 Dominique could've been a low-rent cheap thrill on top of a puzzlement as to why it was even made, but the unbelievably bad choice at the end just blows it.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.

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"The Beekeeper" 4K Review

 I had no intention of watching Jason Statham's latest take butts and kick names action flick, The Beekeeper, until I watched Dan Murrell's absolutely hilarious review where he grappled with just how bonkers and simultaneously terrible AND awesome it was. He's usually pretty sober in his reviews, but when he said that "It's the kind of movie that makes you feel insane while you're watching it....It's the kind of movie that should never come out and also be released five times a year. It is one of the worst movies that I will definitely watch 30 more times in my life." I just had to see what made him give it a split score of Don't Bother AND Go See It! He seemed desperate to find others to discuss this thing with, so I volunteered as tribute along with the missus who has seen even more Statham movies than I have (she likes 'em gruff) and, well, it's certainly a movie alright.

Statham is Adam Clay, a beekeeper who rents barn space from a widow, Eloise (Phylicia Rashad), to process his hives' honey. After clearing a hornets nest from the barn, she invites him to dinner. Before dinner time, she gets on her laptop and it hit with ransomware warning her hard drive is infected and directing her to call a phone number which she does. (Uh-oh.) It connects her to an office which looks like a hybrid dance club and videogame LAN party where she is manipulated into installing a Trojan which immediately allows the hackers to zero out all her bank accounts including a charity fund with over $2 million in it.

Once she realizes she's been robbed, she immediately calls the bank to report it. Just kidding! No, she commits suicide. (Not kidding.) When Statham arrives for dinner, hearing the smoke alarm, he lets himself in and just as he's about to discover Eloise's body is caught by her FBI Agent daughter, Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman, The Umbrella Academy). (If you're wondering why she didn't call her law enforcer daughter instead of killing herself, this will not be the last basic details question you'll be asking along with why was the daughter there in the first place.)

After he is cleared of killing Eloise, he meets with Verona who says that these hackers have been known to the FBI for years, but they can't figure out who they are. Luckily for her, Adam is not just a beekeeper, but a retired Beekeeper, an elite agent of a spy program so secret that the CIA doesn't really know about them. He calls into his old work and immediately gets the number and location of the call center where Eloise called. He goes there with a pair of gas cans and torches the place on his way towards finding the kingpin of scammers, a weaselly tech bro, Derek (Josh Hutcherson, The Hunger Games), who is babysat as a favor to his mother by former CIA Director Wallace (Jeremy Irons) as director of corporate security.

As he closes in on his target, the levels of action and plot twists increase rapidly to the point where he's taking on FBI squads bare-handed and the revelation in the third act of who Derek's mother is cranks the bananas knob to 12.

 Statham has made so many of these action flicks that he can do them in his sleep and frankly for much of the movie, he is so low key in his performance as he mutters about "protecting the hive" - a metaphor for society itself - he may be sleepwalking through this performance. That's not to say he doesn't kick much butt, but that it's oddly subdued.

 Writer Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium, Salt, Total Recall (2012)) and director David Ayer (Fury, Suicide Squad - the first one) have a lot of moderately crowd-pleasing pictures on their resume, so that The Beekeeper seems like a low budget knockoff of the movies they've made feels off.

 But what makes The Beekeeper watchable is just how bonkers it gets at points. It makes one wish they'd gone even MORE over the top in the action, though to be fair John Wick movies occupy so much mindshare for bar-raising action perhaps it's not worth trying to compete at that level. Even as you repeatedly wonder why no one seems to do a realistic thing in these situations - like why is an FBI Agent allowed to lead an investigation regarding a man whose rampage seems triggered by her mother's suicide or how come Minnie Driver is playing the current CIA Director, but for only two scenes? - there's some satisfyingly visceral kills and quips and to be honest, ransomware hackers who prey upon the technically naive deserve to get whupped down by a grouchy Jason Statham.

From a technical perspective, the 4K HDR presentation doesn't really do much to merit the upcharge, so watching in standard HD/Blu-ray is fine.

I don't want to file The Beekeeper under the So Bad It's Good category. It's more like Ayer's cursed Suicide Squad - which to be fair was recut by a frightened studio into a mishmash (#ReleaseTheAyerCut) - which by all objective measures wasn't a very good movie, yet was watchable and entertaining and I don't just mean Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn hot pants outfit. Cable TV used to be filled with rainy weekend day action fluff like The Beekeeper and if you approach it expecting more fun than verisimilitude, you'll be fine.

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

"Silent Night" Review

 You probably didn't notice, but it's been 20 years since legendary Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo - who made his name with action-packed crime dramas like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled then had a decent run in Hollywood with Broken Arrow, Mission: Impossible II, and the best, Face/Off - has made a Hollywood movie, 2003's Paycheck. He's been working back in China, most notable the two Red Cliff films, but now he's back with Silent Night, a unique premise for a Christmas-set movie that was met with middling reviews and audience disinterest, resulting in a rapid trip to streaming in a few weeks.

 Silent Night is about Brian (Joel Kinnaman), a grieving father whose son was killed by a stray bullet when a rolling gun battle between rival gangs passed their home. When he tried to chase down the participants, one gang banger, Playa (Harold Torres), who sports a questionable face tattoo choice shoots him in the throat, robbing him of his voice and providing the movie its hook: There is almost no dialogue spoken by anyone.

After a month in the hospital, he returns home with his wife, Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno, Maria Full of Grace), where he becomes withdrawn, spending his days guzzling straight booze in the garage. After a few months of this, he decides to do something with his life. He gets a calendar, writes "KILL THEM ALL" on the block for December 24, the anniversary of his son's death, then gets down to training to do this. While in the beginning he can't do a single pull-up and seems to hit the ceiling of the range more than the target with his gun, as the deadline nears he gets ripped and on target.

 However, in one smart nod to reality, the first time he tries to use his new combat skills learned off YouTube against someone other than practice dummies, he is almost killed because someone is actually fighting back. He's not Rambo and theoretical practice only gets you so far. That said, his night of vengeance sees him up his game, especially driving and shooting, though never to John Wick level, naturally.

 At its core, Silent Night is a bog standard revenge flick which I'm normally friendly too, but here the conceit is the only distinguishing factor and the gimmick is distracting because it's so unnatural. Other than radios giving dates to mark the passage of time (as if the calendar couldn't provide that) or police chatter, there is no reason why no one else speaks other than the gimmick. This makes for a lot of free time for viewers watching at home to provide their own MST3K/Rifftrax commentary such as when Brian goes into his son's untouched bedroom with stuffed animals strewn on the floor and I cried, "Oh no! No one fed the animals for four months and they starved!" Yes, it undercuts the emotional intent of the scene, but we make our own fun at times.

Kinnaman has one gear for most of his performances - glowering - and he does that here as well with a side of grief. Moreno has little to do but grieve and Kid Cudi as the silent police detective who is peripherally involved does what he can with what little there is to do.

As for Woo, he still has it in his mid-70s and checks a couple of his signature move boxes (yes to shooting with two guns, but not while diving; yes to slow-motion donning of a coat; no to doves scattering in the middle of a gunfight) and there are a couple of really gnarly kills, but this all seems like an experiment which at 1h 44m is much too long for what it does. 

If you want good vengeance, stick with the John Wick series. If you want a violent "Christmas" movie full of bloodshed, but you've seen Elf too many times, check out Violent Night (currently on Prime Video).

Score: 4/10. Skip it.