I miss the suit. I know it’s crazy, but the conservative, and bullet-proof. Black suit that John Wick sports while doing the impossible makes a statement. It does show up, as does Mr. Wick himself, in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, but it only makes me miss it more. While, not as hyperbolically oneiric as the rest of the Wick universe, FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA has its charms. Not the least of which is an extended cameo by Reeves as Wick himself, in the suit, made possible by setting the story in the early years of the franchise when Wick was still working his way out of the Ruska Roma. Never mind if you don’t know what that is, there will be generous, yet not egregious, exposition to bring us all up to speed. There will also be its antithesis in a cult run by The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). It’s just as deadly, but murders for sport as well as commerce, allowing for the sort of philosophical musings about rules and power and blood for which the franchise is so beloved. At least by me.
It is also beloved for its action sequences, that combine kabuki with mayhem in a sort of disciplined ritual of homicide, beautifully choreographed, piquantly conceived, and all played out in a dark world of red, greens, and blues that heighten the reality of unreality.
I’m a fan.
BALLERINA works on a whole different emotional level, however. Honor and loyalty and that adherence to rules that breaks and makes the story is still present, but our protagonist, the eponymous dancer, Eve (Ana de Armas) is not a warrior longing for peace, but a Valkyrie hot for vengeance. Yes, Wick’s first foray was all about payback for a murdered puppy, but it grew from there into almost Jungian considerations of life, death, and the search for meaning. I grow grandiloquent, but the carefully composed montages and sets speak to the symbolic with a sometimes mordant wit. BALLERINA has those moments, and de Armas is a formidable presence as she dances her way through antagonists en route to the author of her childhood trauma. That would be the ci-mentioned Chancellor, who murdered her father, who did manage to take out the squad sent to kill him before succumbing.
Where Wick had weltschmerz, Eve has anger, the thing that sets her apart from the other recruits being trained by The Director (Anjelica Huston) to join the Ruska Roma main source of revenue. Rescued by Winston (wonderfully avuncular and profound Ian McShane), he who runs The Continental in New York (again, you’ll be caught up if you don’t know what that means), she is delivered to The Director with assurances that she is her family. A tough family that has no problem forcing her to dance until her feet bleed but being newly orphaned shrinks one’s options.
Her role after training will be to protect targets of would-be assassins as well as doing a little contract killing herself. It’s a lucrative life, but her goal of finally delivering justice to the man who blighted her childhood is never far from her mind, and when a chance (?) meeting, well, it was a killing, gives her the tantalizing clue a about the people who killed her father for which she’s been waiting, she bucks the system in favor of her original family.
The story is replete with all the tropes we expect in this universe. Eve’s first assignment finds her gliding into a decadent club sporting a slinky sequin dress slit to the hip and destroying with assured gusto the thugs there to kidnap an heiress. Extra points for Eve’s footwear being fetchingly sensible ankle boots with block heels, though if anyone could have done this in stilettos (heels, not weapons), it would have been here. The martial arts are briskly, ahem, executed, here and in subsequent sequences, though there is little of that also ci-mentioned mordant wit until she finds herself in a picture-perfect alpine village and weaponizes a stack of dishes in a delightfully unexpected, yet effective, way.
The way Eve is shown retrieving her daggers after a rout is also in keeping with the “nothing personal” world in which she operates, where commerce makes the rules and the mood is quiet menace punctuated with bursts of spectacular battle. In this, de Armas acquits herself admirably, making credible an assassin who thinks quickly, improvises with authority, cheats with impunity, and, as instructed by The Director, fights like a girl. Yeah, the film is owning that insult and it’s sublime. Yet, where Wick was the walking dead, Eve is afire and that energy changes the dynamic is subtle ways with a killer who is all in. The protagonist is just a little less compelling as an anti-hero(ine). It doesn’t help that de Armas sometimes looks surprised at how deadly she can be. Yet, this is still a thoroughly enjoyable flick–never have flamethrowers been used to better advantage–but not one that approaches the aetherial heights of the Wick series.
BALLERINA takes as its central metaphor a doll twirling atop a music box playing Swan Lake, and it does veer into cloying territory as child and woman Eve stares at it mournfully. Despair not. Before the saccharine has a chance to take hold, darts are shot through eyes, nefarious invaders are enveloped in crimson fog, and Mitteleuropa will erupt in violence that is elegantly directed, punctuated with sweeping shots and quick, brutal takes. As brutal as the rules at the Continental, and just as opulent.
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