Ana de Armas learns to ‘fight like a girl' in John Wick spin-off
(MA) 125 minutes
Rumours of a fifth John Wick film, with Keanu Reeves returning as the world's favourite globetrotting, puppy-loving assassin, remain just rumours for the moment. Meanwhile, Ballerina is being marketed as 'from the world of John Wick' meaning that the heroine Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) is a graduate of the Ruska Roma assassin academy for young ladies, which was first seen in John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum decorously presenting itself to the world as a ballet school.
Anjelica Huston returns as the school's stern, largely deskbound director, and Reeves has what amounts to an extended cameo as Wick, who eventually becomes Eve's reluctant mentor (if you're keeping track, the action takes place in between the third and fourth Wick films).
This has its risks. If you want to watch a James Bond movie, it doesn't mean you want to watch a movie about some other charmingly lethal spy you've never heard of, while Bond stops by for 10 minutes or so to offer advice and support from a distance (nothing like this has ever happened in the past, at least not on the big screen – but we can't rule it out since Amazon now owns the rights to Bond).
Not only does this risk diluting your original brand, but it also gives the impression that you don't believe your new story and character can stand on their own two feet. In the case of Ballerina, there's some reason for this anxiety. The Wick connection aside, what we're dealing with is a very standard revenge yarn, following Eve after graduation as she heads for Europe to seek out the sinister clan that killed her father (David Castaneda).
Good action films have been based on slimmer premises, but none of it winds up being very satisfying, although there's no single reason why. The script is rather disjointed, failing to do much with either the ballerina premise or the backstory involving Eve's dad.
The director Len Wiseman isn't incompetent, but makes no attempt to match the dazzling stunt work of the Wick films at their best. Nor is De Armas the equal of Reeves as an action star (a motif introduced early on involves Eve learning to 'fight like a girl,' but this, too, is exploited less interestingly than might be hoped).
Despite all the impalings and bullets to the head, there is in the end a fatal softness to the whole enterprise: De Armas as Eve is too little the relentless force of nature, too much the worried ingenue, fronting up for her early missions with the look of a would-be entrepreneur applying for her first job at a publishing company.
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