[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Up]
In Theaters Friday, June 6
This is so, so difficult. Just ask Hobbs & Shaw, or Furiosa or Peacock’s The Continental, for that matter. It’s tough to bang an IP drum without the face(s) of that franchise front and center, and try as it might, Ballerina also struggles to clear that hurdle.
A raucous, bloody, action-forward shoot-em-up with just enough bullets, blades, and grenades to keep things interesting for two hours, this John Wick spin-off never fully harnesses the magic of the larger franchise (though not from lack of effort).
Ballerina tells the story of Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), who joins the Ruska Roma ballet company/assassin school at around the age of 9 after a traumatic incident involving her father and a mysterious cult. Ostensibly training as a ballerina under the guidance of the Director (Anjelica Huston), Eve also spends a little over a decade learning the finer points of tactical weapons handling and close quarters combat. Established in John Wick 3 as the source of Wick’s (Keanu Reeves) legendary talents, the Ruska Roma turns Eve into a formidable instrument of righteous, concentrated fury by the time she “graduates” from the school.
Things take a turn for Eve when an assignment brings her into contact with the same cult responsible for her childhood trauma. This inspires her to begin an off-book mission to track down the man behind this mysterious organization, the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), despite warnings from the Director against such action. What follows is a plunge into the Wick-verse, where every kitchen, coffeeshop, and hunting lodge is THICK with assassins, requiring the hero to carve their way out of each scene to make it to the next. As Eve kills her way ever closer to the Chancellor, the stakes continue to rise along with the quality of her opponents (and the action set-pieces themselves).
A somewhat basic and by-the-numbers rehash of all the things that make a John Wick movie fun (a revenge narrative, long-take action sequences, intricate fight choreo, creative kills), Ballerina gets better as it goes on, and feels like a movie with competing styles, beats, and sensibilities between its first and second half. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that has followed the production of the project, which was scheduled to release last summer before series co-creator and John Wick 1-4 director Chad Stahelski came in for extensive reshoots. Len Wiseman is the credited director of Ballerina, but one wonders how much of what appears in the back half of the movie (the best half) is his.
The script also feels patchy, like two stories jammed together, with plotlines and characters coming in and out of Ballerina in a way that leads one to suspect that there’s more of them on the cutting room floor. Characters like Tatiana (Juliet Doherty) and Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) take up a healthy amount of space in the film’s first act only to disappear thereafter, while a sublot involving Norman Reedus just sort of comes and goes at the halfway point. The whole thing stitches together well enough based on the primary A-plot and the action holding it all together, but it feels a little loosey-goosey in parts.
When it comes to the action, however, Ballerina captures the kinetic and tactile energy of the larger John Wick universe and only gets better as it lunges towards its explosive climax. Ever creative and imaginative in the ways its hero can dispatch the baddies, grenades are the MVP of this installment and provide some of the most thrilling moments of the movie. It’s a refreshing change for a franchise that has made bullets sorta obsolete, giving Ballerina a few “oh shit!” moments that the Wick movies have been thin on as of late.
And while she doesn’t come off as an overtly physical presence on-screen, de Armas holds her own throughout the course of the picture and passes as an undersized yet nimble killer. She never quite sells the tortured aspect of her character and seems more annoyed than consumed with rage when going on her killing sprees, however, and it is something all the flamethrowers and headshots can’t paper over. Stahelski might have been able to inject the action with the necessary flair and visual acuity, but the soul of Ballerina feels like an assembly of John Wick leftovers.
Even so, the action and creativity on display is head and shoulders above its primary competition (eat a dick, Fast & Furious), putting this in the same elite category as the other John Wick installments in both its commitment to raw violence and the ingenuity of the same. A bit disjointed at times, sure, but coherent enough to give the action scenes all the runway needed to unfurl their glorious tapestry of mayhem, Ballerina should give fans of the larger franchise all the murderous fun they could reasonably hope for. Whether that’s enough to keep audiences interested without the Baba Yaga front and center remains to be seen, but Ballerina, de Armas, and Stahelski have pulled out all the stops in their attempt to do just that.
“Obvious Child” is the debut novel of Warren Cantrell, a film and music critic based out of Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cantrell has covered the Sundance and Seattle International Film Festivals, and provides regular dispatches for Scene-Stealers and The Playlist. Warren holds a B.A. and M.A. in History, and his hobbies include bourbon drinking, novel writing, and full-contact kickboxing.
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