From the World of John Wick Comes Ballerina, An Enjoyably Cheesy Cannon-style Throwback
If you enjoy movies like this, this will be the kind of movie you enjoy!
The 2013 surprise hit John Wick is elegant in its simplicity. Man gets puppy. Man loves puppy. Bad guys kill the puppy. Man kills the bad guys.
It was tremendously satisfying. One of my hallmarks as a film critic is that I am often wrong. I consequently devoted way too much time and energy to making fun of Keanu Reeves for thinking he could be an action star.
I was wrong! As is generally the case, I was way off-base. John Wick didn’t turn Reeves into an action star. The Matrix, and to a much lesser extent, its sequels, did.
John Wick elevated Reeves to an action icon while simultaneously making two directorial careers in stuntman-turned-filmmaker Chad Stahelski, who is the credited director of the wildly influential 2013 cult classic and its three overachieving sequels, and fellow stuntman turned director David Leitch, who was not credited but leveraged the heat of his co-debut to helm Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, Bullet Train, Atomic Blonde, and most recently, The Fall Guy. The commercially underachieving adaptation of the Lee Major TV series, incidentally, is a goddamn delight.
Success begets success, particularly in Hollywood. After avenging his pup in John Wick, the title character popped up in a series of follow-ups that, in defiance of sequel tradition, were not groaningly arbitrary and willed into existence by the sinister forces of commerce but rather critical and commercial successes that justified their existences.
The filmmakers didn’t stop there. The series inspired a comic book prequel, multiple video games, and a television series that regrettably featured noted creep Mel Gibson.
Now, the world of John Wick has expanded to include Ballerina, a film starring Ana de Armas that takes place within the John Wick universe.
The world of John Wick is unbelievably violent. Forty percent of the people in it are elite assassins. The other sixty are marked for death by elite assassins.
Oh well. It’s still better than the real world.
Ballerina opens with a prologue where the little girl incarnation of protagonist Eve Macarro, who is played as a child by Victoria Comte and as an adult by de Armas, endures the trauma of seeing her beloved father taken out by a team of elite assassins.
Eve goes on to prove the truth of the old aphorism that those who are traumatized by seeing a parent executed by elite assassins are destined to become elite assassins themselves.
Eve is taken under the wing of Ian McShane’s elegant and ominous Winston, the owner of the Continental hotel that serves as the epicenter of the John Wick universe. Eve is trained in the seldom-intertwined arts of murder and dance.
As a ballerina, our iron-willed protagonist practices until she bleeds under the harsh direction of mentor The Director (Angelica Huston, whose old man, incidentally, was something of a director himself), but mostly she makes the people she kills bleed.
De Armas is an atypical action hero. She’s of average height and seems to weigh about a hundred pounds. Compared to the brutes who dominate action movies, de Armas is positively tiny. In a realm of Gullivers, she is Lilliputian.
That means that she racks up a body count to rival small wars not through brute force but rather through unrelenting focus. Eve never stops moving. She’s a whirling dervish adept at the newfangled art of Gun-Fu, the movie-friendly, possibly fictional martial art that combines kicking and punching with shooting people in the face.
Eve’s fists and feet of fury are deadly weapons, but not as fatal as the arsenal at her disposal. Like Reeves in the John Wick quadrology, Eve is vengeance personified. She lives to kill. It is her métier, her art form, her ultimate purpose.
With a less charismatic lead, that kind of humorless intensity could prove dull. Thankfully, de Armas is a tremendously magnetic performer who doesn’t need to smile, laugh, or show any real signs of human emotion other than rage to be compelling.
Eve is an elite killer trained from childhood to be as lethal and unemotional as possible. She’s been conditioned to ignore her humanity for the sake of her profession, but she’s also a lady.
She’s dispatched to kill Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus) but panics when she sees his biracial daughter, Ella (Ava McCarthy). She’s a remorseless killer who has had sociopathy drilled into her by mentors for whom purposeful mass murder is a way of light. But she obviously can’t kill a child who could be her own daughter.
In a different, less kill-crazy world, Eve could have gestated Ella’s growing body inside her womb for nine heavenly months and then given birth to her before pursuing the life of a stay-at-home mom. In this mad world, she cannot give Ella life, but she can keep her from dying prematurely.
Through Daniel, Eve learns that her father was murdered by members of a cult led by The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). The Chancellor doesn’t have the traditional paranoid compound. He has his own murder village full of assassins brainwashed into doing his sinister bidding.
Though John Wick is appealingly modest, everything that has followed has been big and gothic. There are no small rooms in Ballerina. Everything is roughly the size of a football field, including the characters.
The sequels and spin-offs are filled with larger-than-life villains and heroes who do not have names but rather lofty titles like The Director and The Chancellor. Ballerina inhabits a secret world full of rules and traditions. In the world of John Wick, the criminal world has its own set of laws and consequences.
In her mad quest for vengeance, Eve brazenly breaks the rules and defies the laws, so the Director sends John Wick to punish her for her transgressions.
The world-building here is strangely dour and serious, yet that does not keep the franchise from being tremendous fun.
The John Wick franchise established its title icon as the deadliest killer in the history of elite assassins —a cold-blooded killer who murders for money as reflexively as most people breathe.
He’s also canonically a good guy who uses the skills he developed as a bad guy for the ultimate good: avenging puppy murder.
Reeves has been brought back to strengthen the brand. His presence gives the film legitimacy. The filmmakers want to give the film that John Wick feeling, and since Keanu Reeves IS John Wick, he has it in spades.
John Wick isn’t just a good guy. He’s a consummate mensch. He’s hired to kill Eve or get her to leave the murder village before she can embarrass the Chancellor by killing him. First, he asks her to leave. John Wick may have a body count in the triple figures, but he is the most reluctant killer in the world here.
When Eve refuses to leave without winning vengeance, John stops just short of getting on his knees and begging her, pleading. “Please! Pretty please! I have a job to do and money to make, but you seem, if not nice, necessarily, then at least on the side of right. Be a dear and leave so I don’t have to kill you! I was cool with the 179 people I’ve killed so far, but I really don’t want to end your life.”
Eve stubbornly refuses to back down, so not only does John give her the time and space needed to do what she needs to do, he even helps her.
Ballerina exploits the hoary convention of bad people doing bad things for the right reasons, but Eve and John are less troubled anti-heroes than forces for good in the universe who achieve their worthy goals by murdering dozens of people who deserve to be killed.
When I watch a cheesy movie like Ballerina, I ask myself, “Would Cannon have released this in 1985, possibly with a miscast Lucinda Dickey in the lead?” I am pleased to report that with Ballerina, the answer is yes.
Like the similarly satisfying and shameless Jason Statham vehicle The Beekeeper, Ballerina delivers the B-movie goods in abundance. It’s spectacularly enjoyable cheese, distinguished by a terrific lead performance by de Armas. She’s a distinguished, Academy-Award-winning dramatic actress who makes a smooth transition here into being an ice-cold badass.
Three and a half stars out of five