The Trap of the Cinematic Side Quest
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What makes the John Wick movies work isn't the premise—that John Wick, the character, is a man out for vengeance. Yes, that was the breathless elevator pitch of the first Wick installment, a cult hit in 2014 whose plot my colleague Sophie Gilbert effortlessly summed up as: 'An idiot killed his puppy and now everyone must die.' But Wick (played by Keanu Reeves) became the face of a billion-dollar franchise because of the strange, darkly cartoonish universe around him. Ballerina, a spin-off whose lumbering subtitle proclaims it as coming 'From the World of John Wick,' recognizes that true appeal only when it's half over.
The story of Ballerina is generic to the point of hilarity; the original script was, in fact, a female-led action thriller unrelated to the Wick-iverse. As such, the film begins with the same setup as a hundred other revenge thrillers: A young girl, Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), sees her father gunned down by a group of mysterious assassins. Spirited away by friendly faces from the primary John Wick entries, she swears vengeance, and is trained to be a killer in the mold of, well, John Wick. Her mentor is the Director (Anjelica Huston), the matriarch of the Ruska Roma, an organization introduced in John Wick: Chapter 3 that teaches its students how to punch, kick, shoot a gun, and take a fall among the best of them.
For much of Ballerina's two-hour run time, I bemoaned that the film seemed to be a Wick clone without any of the stylistic flair. It wasn't a total wash: De Armas is a charming screen presence, throwing herself at fight scenes with aplomb. She moves with a lot more grace than Reeves, who appears to be slowing down after a quadrilogy in which seemingly everyone across the globe is on his tail. But unlike the mysterious, mythic Wicks, Ballerina lacks much intrigue—especially during its first two acts, when the viewer watches Eve go through training and then embark on a few jobs around town, mowing through goons in dimly lit nightclubs for no purpose to the plot.
[Read: John Wick and the tragedy of the aimless assassin]
The sense of aimlessness is an issue with so many spin-offs. Think Hobbs & Shaw (which derives from the Fast & Furious movies), Bumblebee (set in the Transformers universe), or the several attempts to generate new Star Wars adventures outside of the main saga: They have to exist on a scale equivalent to their progenitors to not feel totally irrelevant, but avoid disturbing the franchise's primary timeline. Although Ballerina ostensibly occurs between the third and fourth John Wick chapters, it strives to affect neither one; the chronological placement is only to justify how Reeves (who doesn't do much in his several brief scenes) manages to show up—though having watched the other Wick movies, I do not remember his character ever having enough downtime to take on a little side quest with Eve.
Ballerina ultimately succeeds as a piece of junky fun, however, because it attempts to expand the Wick canon rather than deepen its titular protagonist. Take what follows after Eve becomes emboldened to hop off the regular mission treadmill and seek payback against the strange cult that killed her father: Her journey leads her into a quaint village in the Austrian Alps, where she learns that every single inhabitant is out to kill her. Considering stopping by the curiosity shop for some Hummel figurines? Just don't turn your back to any friendly clerks.
This scenario is a prime example of John Wick's signature world building. As the first Wick movie progressed, the bizarre depths in which the character lived became apparent. Everyone around our hero was connected to criminality, and any ordinary subway rider or unhoused person on a street corner might be concealing a semiautomatic to attack him with. John Wick's version of reality has its own currency (golden coins) and housing system (an intercontinental chain of hotels), as well as a set of laws that mix Samurai-like honor with feudal justice. At first, Ballerina pays little mind to any of that, but once Eve enters this cultish mountain town, the askew storytelling begins again. Finally, I was reminded of why I'd stayed interested in the Wick chronicles for all these years.
[Read: Spin-Off City: Why Hollywood is built on unoriginal ideas]
Yes, that includes the action filmmaking, and Ballerina features some incredibly inventive stunts of its own. One extended sequence sees Eve dueling an enemy while each wields flamethrowers; in another, she has to dispatch oncoming aggressors using belts of grenades without blowing herself up. The grim violence has a sense of humor and improvisation to it; de Armas doesn't exactly get the chance to crack jokes, but it harkens back to the Buster Keaton– and Looney Tunes–inspired mayhem at the core of John Wick. Whereas an offshoot like Hobbs & Shaw didn't understand what made its source series good (by largely ignoring the earlier films' wild internal logic), Ballerina eventually comes to terms with it—and then locks on.
But despite its best efforts to appeal to the John Wick fan base, Ballerina opened below expectations during its first weekend. The box-office earnings are a possible indication of waning interest in the world of John Wick, which may be taken into account as Reeves weighs returning for another mainline entry. After all, a film like Ballerina ostensibly exists only to keep the franchise's devotees sated in the meantime. Perhaps this kind of business-minded cynicism is unhelpful, but it's unavoidable, as Hollywood flounders for ways to sustain people's interest in going to the cinema. If studios are going to spin off their biggest titles to keep those properties alive, they might as well do it as faithfully as possible.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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