John Wick can now boast as being among the franchises with its own cinematic universe with the arrival of its first spin-off film, Ballerina. One of the most popular action franchises of the last decade, John Wick made a name for itself through intense hand-to-hand fighting and gunplay, a hybrid style that earned it the moniker “gun-fu.” Regardless of one’s opinions on the individual films or entire series, it certainly helped revitalize Keanu Reeves‘s career and has fairly earned praise for the detailed stunt work.
Despite the mainline series potentially ending (though it seems like a fifth film will go forward), Hollywood is not one to let sleeping dogs lie, or at least money-making opportunities. Thus we have Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas, whose own career in action films broke out with her well-received performance in No Time to Die. The film comes courtesy of director Len Wiseman, known mostly for his involvement in the Underworld series and directing several TV pilots.
Ballerina is solid enough to be immediately counted as Wiseman’s best film, though it is still a mixed bag overall. At its core, Ballerina is yet another film about revenge. Instead of a dog symbolic of a dead wife, this time Armas is seeking revenge for father’s death at the hand of an unnamed killer assassin family that has no rules. Armas’s Eve is trained by the same Slavic faction that Wick’s own character originates from.
The primary issue with the film is poor storytelling pace and thin plot. The first third of the film is comprised of Eve’s origin story, showing her father’s death in an overly long intro sequence before showing us all of the training she goes through. While this somewhat adds to the worldbuilding of the universe, its actual narrative value is limited. If the intent is to acquaint the audience more with Eve’s character, this fails because she is given little in the way of defining characteristics past anger and determination. But this is the same quality that defines most every character of note in these films.
The rest of the plot is nothing more than Eve’s investigations into the assassin family, which are all excuses for further action scenes. This underlies the larger problems with the films as the series has progressed. While one would never call the storytelling in John Wick complex, there was at least a defined, singular character arc for Wick and a sense of progression. But as the movies have gone on, the scripts have stopped trying to develop the characters, and the plots have become nothing more than shallow vehicles to deliver action scenes.
Some may argue that’s the entire point of these movies and that stronger storytelling is not the point. Yet the first two films managed to have both, and there’s no reason Ballerina couldn’t do the same. While Armas is a fine enough lead, there is so little to work with on the page that she ultimately fails to leave much of an impression. The storytelling that does happen in these movies tends to focus on the increasingly convoluted rules of the assassin guilds. The assassin rules add to the universe and help distinguish it, but the writers need to learn to reign in the excess and find a new storytelling mode besides revenge. Otherwise, this series will continue to stagnate and fail to live up to its potential.
Part of the problem, too, is the further abandonment of realism. The police never appear no matter how extravagant the fights become, and bystanders don’t even react to the huge gun fights half the time. Characters survive wounds and hits that no human would remotely have a chance of surviving. Again, some may argue that’s the point, but the first two films allowed Wick to actually get hurt, and they focused on him reloading his gun clips and managing his resources. This added tension and made the action scenes better as a result. While elaborate fight choreography is nice, there is inherently less tension when it doesn’t feel there is any chance of the lead character suffering real consequences for her injuries.
That said, Ballerina does deserve credit for adding to the fight scene repertoire. After so many films, one wonders if they can come up with anything new and different. There are two great scenes in this, one involving a fight with grenades akin to the knife fight from the third film. While it is quite egregious in its abandonment of realism, there is admittedly a childish glee to the destruction. Said glee can also be found in the other notable scene, where characters have a shoot-out with flamethrowers. Action junkies will likely find these two scenes alone worth the price of admission.
One just wishes that the movie kept some intelligence while amping up the action. There’s no reason why they can’t have their cake and eat it too, with a little more effort. If there were more sense of mortal peril, resource management, and danger of attracting authorities, it would enhance the extravagant action instead of taking away from it. As it is, Ballerina rests somewhere around mid-tier. It avoids being quite as silly as the third and fourth films, but it still fails to get close to the heights of the first two.
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