Ballerina review - hollow point

John Wick’s simple story of a man and his dog became a bonkers, baroque franchise in record time, converting Keanu Reeves’ limited acting into Zen killer cool. Now Ana de Armas extends her delightful No Time to Die cameo as a high-kicking, cocktail-dressed MI6 agent into her own heroic assassin.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, to give its full cumbersome franchise title, takes place between John Wick 3 and 4, prior to the latter’s perhaps final denouement. We meet Eve as a child hiding out with a dad whose particular set of skills are sorely tested by a mass assault by minions of the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), chief of a killer cult rival to Wick’s Ruska Roma. Eve proves a dead shot even before she is taken under the relatively kindly wing of Winston Scott (Ian McShane), proprietor of the neutral hotel where assassins kick back, then Ruska Roma’s Director (Anjelica Huston, pictured below), who schools her protégés in The Red Shoes-like, bleeding en pointe and parallel ninja skills.

Ruska Roma’s theatre HQ shares the Wick-verse’s taste for tenebrous Old World lamplight, lustrous felt and gilt and brass steampunk tech. Here petite Eve learns to “fight like a girl”, disabling brawnier blokes in a style familiar from Jennifer Lawrence’s dancer-spy in Red Sparrow (2018), Blake Lively in The Rhythm Section (2020) and Charlize Theron, the most convincingly capable of these action heroines in John Wick co-director David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde (2017). Reflecting sexist double-standards for female leads, none led to a franchise – not even Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow (2021), greenlit as an afterthought to her character’s death. Ballerina has the benefit and handicap of sheltering beneath John Wick’s wing, and de Armas throws herself into the mayhem with charisma and energy.

Eve’s desire to avenge her dad and Wick-like disregard for tribal truces is Ballerina’s emotional heart, but director Len Wiseman and screenwriter Shay Hatten leave little time for recognisable humanity as Eve assaults the Chancellor’s Mitteleuropean mountain lair. In Ballerina’s funniest touch, even this village’s most innocent-looking barmaid and puffa-jacketed ski mum are assassins, defending the secret, snowbound streets set aside for their downtime.

The Wick films’ great boon to action cinema is their cleanly choreographed, clear fight scenes, as co-directors and stuntmen Leitch and Chad Stahelski showed up the CGI-crazed chaos preceding them. Stahelski remains as producer and again offers a film as protracted fight scene, as Eve grabs kitchen utensils and grenades and engages in a flamethrower-water hose duel with madcap conviction, dispatching infinite heavies in a mix of computer game and cartoon logic, garnished with gleeful horror gore. For those wondering, Keanu contributes. But much like latter-day Marvel battles, the freneticism wears thin as the gears grind on empty.

Ballerina is a typical 2020s blockbuster, employing fine actors to portentously emote (“At a time of loss there is nothing easier than pity, and nothing harder than truth,” McShane advises with a straight face) while spuriously thin yet exponentially growing mythologies justify the punch-ups. There is art in those punch-ups and pleasure in de Armas’s mostly physical performance, even as Hollywood remains unsure of her star power’s best use. But this is cinema abstracted from any real flesh and blood, mind and soul.

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