Something ‘Wick’-ish this way comes
You probably already know where you stand on the John Wick action movies.
Either you think they’re dazzling displays of state-of-the-art fight choreography and darkly detailed world-building or they’re deplorable wallows in gun fetishism and ultraviolence — the apex of R-rated commercial entertainment or the nadir of a culture that’s been numbed by video game carnage and can only cheer on the cleverness of the kill.
This being America, of course, they’re both.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.“Ballerina” — technically titled “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” — is more and less of the same, a spin-off that stars Ana de Armas (“Knives Out,” “Blonde,” “No Time to Die”) as Eve Macarro, a dancer/killer in the secretive Ruska Roma school for assassins.
The character turned up briefly in the third John Wick film played by Unity Phelan, a ballet dancer who has since been unceremoniously jettisoned for lacking the necessary star power and oomph.
Here the character has been re-envisioned as a wide-eyed yet steel-nerved dispenser of mayhem and vengeance.
An opening scene sees little Eve (Victoria Comte) traumatised by the death of her father (David Castañeda) at the hands of a secretive cult led by the Chancellor (a sepulchral Gabriel Byrne) and vowing revenge as she rises in the Ruska Roma ranks.
Her mentors include the school’s Director (Anjelica Huston, doling out the ham with the finesse of a third-generation pro) and Winston (Ian McShane), the proprietor of the New York Continental Hotel for Hit Men and Ladies and a welcome holdover from the canonical films.
How’s de Armas? She handles the stunts with skill and enthusiasm, the acting chores less notably. (In her defense, Shay Hatten’s script is strictly functional, with all the best lines given to the colourful array of supporting characters.)
Besides the baroque action scenes and the franchise’s vision of a global steampunk bureaucracy of evil, the main asset of the John Wick movies has always been Wick himself, as played by Keanu Reeves with a Zen exhaustion that’s a rare and mighty thing.
De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.
At a certain point however, two things happen.
One is a special guest appearance that re-energises the film, and the other is director Len Wiseman’s unexpected commitment to slapstick humour.Maybe call it slap-death. We’ve had a taste in a midmovie sequence in which Eve is beating on a fellow assassin with a TV remote, causing a nearby screen to flicker on with clips of the Three Stooges, “Airplane!” and Buster Keaton.
Later, there’s a marvellous game of dinnerware three-card monte with a gun hidden somewhere beneath a pile of fallen plates.
The many, many disposable extras are dispatched with a grim merriment you will find either to your liking — the audience at my screening hooted in approval — or actively depressing, and even a doubter may have to admit that the creative gymnastics with which people here get shot, stabbed, blown up, impaled, garroted, dismembered or finished off with an ice skate to the head are impressive and often enlivening, like a Bob Fosse dance routine with gallons of fake blood. (A scene in which Eve visits a munitions specialist is standard gun porn, though, and notably dull until someone has the bright idea to open a case of grenades.)
Likewise, the series’s vision of an underworld bound by arcane pacts of honor and maintained via dusty pneumatic tubes and CRT terminals from the 1970s would be pompous if it weren’t so engagingly silly.
All those rules about who gets to kill whom and when and how! I thought the whole point of being a villain was that you didn’t have to follow rules.
“Ballerina” takes this bizarro-world civic mindset to a logical extreme in a bravura third act set in a Czech mountain village, where every last inhabitant down to the schoolchildren is a professional assassin and where ordering a cafe latte is an invitation to a knife fight.
It’s lunatic and just slightly too close to home in these fraught and fractured days.
The world of “Ballerina” is one where everybody knows your name — and it’s written on every bullet.
