Taylor Swift was wrong. No, I’m not talking about her removing “you’re gay!” from “Picture to Burn.” In her song “Wildest Dreams,” she bittersweetly reflects how “nothing lasts forever.” Sorry Swift, but in Hollywood, exploiting every last penny out of familiar brand names “never goes out of style.” How else to explain the existence of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina? This spin-off arrives two years after the John Wick franchise firmly killed off this beloved Keanu Reeves. That should’ve been the end of this saga. But John Wick studio Lionsgate loves money. Thus, Ana de Armas has been recruited to "begin again" the John Wick series with a spin-off taking place between the third and fourth John Wick movies. The mission is to make "sparks fly" for action movie geeks.
The original John Wick began in media res with the titular Keanu Reeves assassin just enjoying his quiet life and puppy until some reckless gangster teenagers ruined everything. Other characters constantly talked about his mythic past in hushed, revered whispers. Excessive flashbacks were not the order of the day. After all, that would get in the way of John Wick’s revenge mission in the here and now. Shay Hatten’s Ballerina screenplay (which five other screenwriters tinkered with) immediately forgoes that brevity. Instead, audiences witness an extended flashback of protagonist Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) as a child witnessing her father perishing at the hands of The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne).
After this slaying, the now-orphaned Macarro is visited at the police station by a familiar John Wick face, Winston Scott (Ian McShane). He offers her the choice to either live a normal life or train as an assassin. Scott and fellow John Wick veteran The Director (Anjelica Huston) manifest in this flashback through crummy digital de-aging making the characters look overly artificial. Their facial movements seem to outright lag, like glitching video game characters. The inaugural John Wick movie scrappily refuted excessively digital early 2010s R-rated action fare like The Expendables. Now, Ballerina sees the saga succumbing to those same inorganic impulses.
Meanwhile, the emphasis on hand-holding the audience through Macarro’s past also undercuts the elegant simplicity that marked the first John Wick feature. Heck, even the three-hour epic John Wick: Chapter 4 hit the ground running with an epic, unforgettable sequence involving Wick loudly pounding a punching bag. Ballerina, meanwhile, begins with too much exposition explaining how Macarro came to train as a ballerina/assassin under The Director and Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). Theatricality is eschewed for lore. There’s so much information to convey that the script even incorporates two separate time-jumps.
The latter of those leaps forward, showing Macarro two months after she begins working as an assassin for hire, is really where director Len Wiseman should’ve begun Ballerina. For one thing, after the words “Two Months Later” flash on-screen, an amusing dark gag transpires concerning Macarro walking past a hotel room littered with henchmen she’s viciously dispatched. That’s a way more involving way to kick off an action film. That fun beat is quickly followed up by the most inspired camerawork in all of Ballerina, which subverts the visual language of a typical cinematic ending scene (specifically the camera pulling back for a wide shot capturing the protagonist driving away to their next task) to instead kick off another skirmish. Finally, Ballerina has some energy and exciting imagery.
This also would’ve been a wise kick-off point for Ballerina since it’s where the plot proper begins. While dispatching an opponent, Macarro recognizes a tattoo on this guy’s arm. She previously saw it on one of her father’s killers. Turns out, these assassins belong to an elusive cult residing in the snowy European mountains. The Chancellor is the Jim Jones/ Marshall Applewhite/Charles Manson of the operation. Now, Macarro’s on a mission to secure vengeance for her dad. This means abandoning the protection of The Director (who warns her not to confront this cult) and tracking down folks like Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus) for more information on her targets.
On the road to revenge, Macarro engages in a slew of hand-to-hand fight scenes that were allegedly largely reshot by original John Wick helmer Chad Stahelski. Oftentimes, hiring another filmmaker to overhaul a modern blockbuster in reshoots just creates additional problems for an already troubled production. If it’s true Stahelski oversaw Ballerina’s action set pieces, then getting this Wick veteran back was a shrewd idea. At least this spin-off now delivers fleeting bursts of the John Wick saga’s most famous attribute: fighting. If you’ve come to your local multiplex just to watch people beat the snot out of each other in stylish locales, you might walk away from Ballerina briefly satisfied.
It’s cute that this Ana de Armas star vehicle briefly features clips from a Three Stooges sketch and the most famous stunt from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. After all, these John Wick movies have always relied on physical violence harkening back to vintage slapstick fests. Ballerina’s greatest hand-to-hand duels lean into this quality. For instance, there’s a great bit centered on Macarro duking it out with a woman in a kitchen involving both a seemingly endless pile of glass plates and a hysterical capper to the set piece (nicely framed in a wide shot) hinging on a walk-in freezer. Similar laud-worthy segments of maximalist violence include Pine creatively utilizing a plastic tarp and Macarro getting a LOT of mileage out of some grenades.
Still, these set pieces often deploy backdrops that aren’t extremely memorable. Macarro’s initial deployment of a flame-thrower in the third act occurs in a darkened underground bunker lacking any razzle-dazzle. A lengthy confrontation with henchmen in Prague arises against a forgettable interior construction site. Confining the last 50 minutes to just a single snow-laden town also makes various environments blur together. At least Macarro’s fighting style is fun to watch. Whereas Wick is slick and cool as a cucumber even when he’s bludgeoning dudes with a gigantic book, Macarro’s enjoyably feral as she plunges her fingers into people’s eyeballs or nonchalantly lunges axes into dude’s heads.
Ballerina’s action sequences are a mixed bag. However, they’re positively divine compared to the rest of the choppy production. Disjointed is the best descriptor for Ballerina. There’s little cohesion or palpable dramatic tension in this excessively overstuffed film. Midway through the feature, The Chancellor’s followers kidnap a child. This development should rock Macarro to her core given how this cult previously upended her life at a young age. Instead, seconds after this development, Ballerina’s script is making jokes about “you need to check out early” or Fozzie Bear-style puns about the names of gun store owners.
This kid’s endangerment is utterly superfluous to Macarro, which dilutes Chancellor’s intimidating stature. If him capturing a youngster doesn’t send Macarro into a panic, why should the audience care? This whole subplot is one of Ballerina plot threads struggling to stand out in a crowded script. This includes a mid-movie revelation about Macarro’s secret familial ties to an antagonist. This development falls flat since it concerns a barely-seen supporting character. Even The Chancellor’s personality suffers from that problem. He’s introduced in the opening flashback talking endlessly about “fate”, yet that quality doesn’t manifest again in his motivations or ceaseless chatter until the finale. Ballerina has tons of ideas for melodrama, but little notion of how to properly execute them.
Alas, that deluge of concepts doesn’t extend to creating especially fun villains for Macarro’s journey. Rather than having her face off with Katy O’Brian, Cynthia Rothrock, or Veronica Ngo, Macarro just fights interchangeable henchmen devoid of any outlandish personalities or any sense of screen presence. Even having Ballerina’s lead scuffle against John Wick doesn’t add much excitement. It’s a very obligatory appearance that (though chronologically taking place before John Wick: Chapter 4) can’t help but cheapen the character’s previous demise. Not even death can let John Wick rest. Middling spin-offs must have his face on their posters.
If Keanu Reeves doesn't have the space to reach his potential in Ballerina, you can bet fellow John Wick fixtures Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard also struggle with their latest original score for this saga. Winston Scott's early mention of a classical composer to a young Macarro as she clutches a ballerina music box clearly inspired a score eager to contrast "proper" ballet musical accompaniment with something unexpectedly modern. This means leaning even heavier into John Wick's default electronic sonic ambiance to create a dubstep-heavy score that also takes cues from Masato Nakamura's Sonic the Hedgehog 2 tracks.
The intent is admirable, but like so much in Ballerina, the execution is severely lacking. While earlier Bates and Richard John Wick soundtracks had a variety of musical influences (including exploiting Western and horror score leitmotifs), Ballerina’s orchestral tracks suffer from uniformity. Emphasizing a distinctive personality and versatility would’ve benefited these pieces tremendously. At least this score echoes Ballerina as a larger, flawed movie. Reliably strong work from Ana de Armas and some fun action beats cannot keep this spin-off from ultimately underwhelming. More befuddlingly jumbled than outright bad, Ballerina needed greater precision and heavier doses of imaginative excitement. A version of this motion picture that lives up to its potential, that only exists in our “wildest dreams.”
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