BALLERINA REVIEW
“De Armas and the jaw-dropping action setpieces mostly make up for any issues with the writing and storytelling”
I’m not always as rah-rah about some movies as others, and I was pretty mixed on the John Wick franchise up until Chapters 3 and 4 came along, and director Chad Stahelski finally started delivering on the promise of his action franchise’s intended worldbuilding. Maybe he just needed a few movies to get the bigger budget he clearly needed to make the action movies he wanted to make, or maybe I just got accustomed to the way Keanu Reeves growled every line like a younger Clint Eastwood. In other words, the franchise grew on me.
Along comes Ballerina – no, I will not write out that whole “From the World of John Wick” every time, because it’s something I find completely unnecessary, especially once you put Reeves in the actual trailer – the first spin-off from the franchise and a way to give Ana de Armas a bigger action role after her scene-stealing 15 minutes in the Bond movie, No Time to Die.
The film begins with the laziest of “origin stories” for Eve Macarro as we watch her father be killed by a group of assassins who plan to take her away. The young girl saves herself by killing one of them, and now an orphan, she’s brought by Ian McShane’s Winston to see Anjelica Huston’s Director of the “Ruska Roma” tribe. Eve trains under her to become a Kikimora, an assassin who takes on missions that involve protecting others – oddly, Eve’s actual ballet skills are quite lacking. After passing her first test, Eve encounters Reeves’ Wick, who warns her that she can leave this life at any time.
Clearly, most people will be going to see Ballerina for its action sequences, and those do indeed deliver, though neither Eve’s origin nor the revenge thriller aspect to the story are particularly original or interesting, and it leads to periods of bland storytelling makes for tedious viewing before kicking into another great action sequence. The movie also goes so hard on trying to keep all the built-in franchise mythology with the Continentals, the coins, the tattooed phone operators, and various rules, which also might be boring to those who never felt the need for that stuff to be rehashed, and that’s even more the case here.
Throughout the film, we learn that a cult led by Gabriel Byrne’s Chancellor was responsible for the death of Eve’s father, and against the Director’s orders, Eve decides to go after this cult, which leads to Ballerina having a similar international landscape as the last two “Wick” movies.
Len Wiseman might seem like a fairly obvious choice to direct this spin-off, since he began his career messing around in franchise world-building, making Underworld with Kate Beckinsale, his wife of 15 years. There have long been rumors that the film’s one-year delay led to Stahelski doing reshoots, though it’s not something you can really tell unless you presume the John Wick director handled the action sequences, since many of those are indeed on par with the Wick films.
More than anything, Ballerina offers a terrific role for de Armas with a movie that maintains its focus very much on her character, even as other characters from the franchise show up – Lance Reddick died over two years ago, but they clearly filmed scenes of his character Charon before then, which is a nice touch. There are also a few new characters, most notably Norman Reedus’ Daniel Pine, whose daughter is being targeted by the same cult that went after the younger Eve. It was also nice (and somewhat surprising) to see Maria Full of Grace’s Oscar-nominated star Catalina Sandino Moreno in a small but crucial role. Wick himself returns for a much larger role in the film’s last act than anyone might be expecting. I know that when I saw Reeves in the trailers, I assumed it would be a glorified cameo, but in fact, it’s a significant role, even if the timeline is unclear.
The film’s action scenes intensify as Eve starts using everything at her disposal to fight off various assailants, including ice skates during one sequence, but the true pinnacle of the film’s last act is when she casually picks up a flamethrower, which leads to a blazing (sorry) third act action sequence where she literally fights fire with fire. (Again, I apologize for those childless Dad jokes.)
Although some of the problems mentioned keep Ballerina from being quite on par with the last two Wick movies, de Armas and the jaw-dropping action setpieces mostly make up for any issues with the writing and storytelling. In other words, this movie also grew on me as it went along.
Rating: 7/10
Ballerina opens nationwide on Friday, June 6.
Massive thanks to stuntperson extraordinaire Kimmy Suzuki for joining me as my guest and giving me some great behind-the-scenes insight about the stunt people in the movie.