What makes a John Wick movie work?
That’s a question that Hollywood has been collectively attempting to answer for the past decade now, as every other mid-budget action film released seems to be an active attempt at aping the John Wick style, in some form or another. And yet, so many of them have failed to capture the magic of this franchise, which puts the new spin-off film, the Ana de Armas-starring Ballerina, in a fascinatingly conflicted position: can it prove its worth as a proper John Wick film, or will it simply be another in a long line of lackluster knockoffs?
TRAILER
The Story: (C)
Ballerina is a film whose opening twenty minutes or so are kind of unbelievably harmful to the film as a whole. From its years-prior opening prologue to its initial establishing of Ana de Armas’ character Eve as a ballerina-assassin-type, the film makes all of this feel like needless busywork that it feels obligated to do, but fails to ever give an impression of why. It feels like an origin story for a character we’ve never met in the worst of ways, checking off clichés and trite beats as if it’s been bound and shackled to them by some previously established lore.
In reality, the film doesn’t actually get going until around the thirty-minute mark, and I couldn’t help but fantasize about a version of the film that trimmed out all of the extraneous opening fluff and opted for a leaner structure. Turning the essential information of the opening sequence into flashbacks peppered lightly throughout the first-act proper would have helped with momentum, established a better connection to Eve as a character out of the gate, and gotten things off to a much stronger start all around. The first John Wick film famously threw audiences into the deep end and made a meal out of revealing the full extent of his past over the course of the film, so it’s a baffling choice for this film to get so lost in the woods here, confusing excessive backstory for meaningful character development.
The Visuals: (B+)
For my money’s worth, the essential ingredients that make the John Wick films work is a combination of the all-in physicality of Keanu Reeves and the boundless cinema-of-attractions-indebted imagination and creativity of director Chad Stahelski. Over the course of the films (I am very much of the opinion that the four proper John Wick films each improve upon the last) you can see the actor-director duo honing and refining their own sense of cinematic language, tying their boundary-pushing, death-defying stuntwork to insane new heights while also increasingly grounding it in silent-era cinematic vernacular. It’s no coincidence that there are now multiple Buster Keaton film clips peppered in across the franchise. So without Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski, how does Ballerina fare?
Well, the film ultimately winds up only kind of answering that question in spurts, because huge chunks of the movie have heavy involvement from both Reeves and Stahelski. Though the credited director is Len Wiseman (who is very talented, I say as a fan of Live Free or Die Hard), the film has had an infamously bumpy road to release, with franchise creator Stahelski coming in to reshoot substantial portions of it. Nowhere is this elongated road to the screen more apparent than in the presence of the late great Lance Reddick returning for one final performance here, despite the fact that he passed away more than two years ago.
So while the film constantly looks like an elaborately stylized and high-end John Wick production, it only occasionally really feels like one. But when it does come alive, it genuinely goes full-throttle, in some frankly jaw-dropping ways. There are some absolutely standout setpieces in this film (that I’m going to assume are most likely the work of Stahelski, seeing as there is a fairly stark contrast between them and some of the earlier action sequences) that see the film not only delivering on Stahelski’s unique brand of ever-heightening, no-holds-barred, creative action, but also pushing things even further. From grenades to ice skates to flamethrowers, the latter half of the film has ruthlessly intense, fluid, and extremely satisfying set pieces built around unexpected items in an incredibly inventive fashion.
The Sound: (B)
Stahelski’s overhaul was apparently so substantial that the reshot version of Ballerina required an entirely new score, now provided by franchise regular Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard. I wouldn’t call the results breathtaking or even particularly surprising, but it’s Bates doing very much what he does. It’s propulsive and percussive in a way that works well with the action beats.
The sound design is similarly tactile, with some really standout beats in the best action sequences of the film. My personal favorite moment of the full-on assault of the sound design has to be a critical moment where Eve slams a man into a metal table in tandem with a grenade, and it’s just glorious.
The Performances: (B)
It’s a huge cast of characters, many of whom are returning from prior Wick films, but far and away the character on whose shoulders the film falls is Ana de Armas’ Eve, and she does a pretty stellar job. There is some occasional jankiness to her vocal delivery, with more than a few scenes feeling like they’ve been substantially reworked with ADR, but these are minor quibbles that I don’t honestly care all that much about. As a performer, emotionally and physically, she brings her A-game and really delivers. By the end of the film, she’s more than earned her place on-screen alongside Reeves’ character, and that’s no small feat.
I will simply add that I also found it amusing how heavily Norman Reedus was advertised as a major player in this, only to appear in the film for a handful of minutes and be cut out in the reshoots.
RGM GRADE
(B-)
Overall, Ballerina gets off to a muddled and perplexing start, but gradually finds its rhythm and groove over the course of its super-stuffed runtime. By the film’s latter half, it is gluttonously bursting at the seams with inventive choreography and balls-to-the-wall innovation, much of which feels distinctly attributable to Chad Stahelski. It certainly leaves the audience on a high note, but one can’t help but wish the road to getting to that section of the film had been a bit more elegantly cultivated.
