Ballerina review – Ana de Armas racks up the kills as she pirouettes into John Wick spin-off

The Guardian

2 days ago

That title could cause confusion. The film might accidentally tap into the Frozen customer-base, and millions of wide-eyed little girls in sparkly tutus and tiaras will show up at cinemas with their mums and dads to watch Keanu Reeves let a heavy-set gangster have it in the chops with a round from his specially customised Glock. Well, the confusion is deliberate. Here, the delicacy of ballet and the violence of martial arts are conflated. In this new spin-off feature from Keanu's John Wick action franchise – an auxiliary episode on the timeline, between Wick episodes Three and Four, when JW was lying low, recovering from injuries – a mysterious new action-slash-classical-dance heroine called Eve now grands-jetés her way into the franchise, played by the always stylish Ana de Armas. JW veteran Shay Hatten writes the screenplay and Len Wiseman directs.
The central idea returns me an old maxim of mine: people who call action scenes in films 'balletic' have never seen a ballet, or indeed a fight, in their lives. Yet I was sort of hoping that de Armas's ballerina Eve Macarro would put the smackdown on a couple of dozen goons while up on pointe. Sadly no. But I do have to admit that de Armas carries off the essential silliness of Ballerina and, after her performance as Paloma in No Time to Die opposite Daniel Craig's 007, she proves again she can do action, in both couture and daytime wear; she can also carry out the time-honoured lightning-fast choreography of removing a clip from an automatic weapon, inspecting its contents, smacking it back into position with the heel of her palm and then filling someone full of lead.
Eve is inducted into the way of violence as a little kid, like Natalie Portman's badass moppet in Luc Besson's Léon, or indeed like John Wick himself; she is secretly trained in weaponry and martial arts at the same time as she is schooled in ballet, the rigour and discipline of which are considered to be complementary to those of beating the jeepers out of someone. It happened after her dad was whacked by a mysterious cult led by a dead-eyed creep called the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), and the plucky orphan is taken in by the Ruska Roma group led by Anjelica Huston's implacable Director, and grows to womanhood in this strange, dysfunctional ballet-plus-violence organisation whose income apparently derives from assassination fees. But Eve has always nursed a desire for revenge against the weird tribe who killed her dad.
Four John Wick films with Keanu fetishising his guns and sporting his increasingly werewolfy facial hair have been increasingly heavy going but now de Armas mixes things up and she is a smart screen presence. As for the ballet, the emphasis is on Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake; nothing wrong with that, of course, but if the Ballerina sub-franchise continues, let's hope that different works are chosen and we see de Armas actually getting out there on stage in a tutu as opposed to simply racking up the kills.
Ballerina is out on 6 June in Australia and the US, and on 7 June in the UK.