Ballerina
I’m okay with those Continental Hotel types assassinating each other in the hundreds – but I draw the line at not muting phone alerts in a theatre during a ballet performance, which ought to put a bigger bounty on their heads.
Following The Continental, a streaming series I’ve not got round to watching, this is a spin-off ‘from the world of John Wick’ and Keanu Reeves puts in a glum appearance as the righteous if genocidal assassin – allowing for one brief dubbed-in ‘scenes we’d love to see’ moment as one among many faceless goons hesitates (‘that’s John Wick – it’s suicide’) before rushing in to face the hero and joining the many faceless corpses he’s left lying about. It opens with that Swan Lake snatch which kicked off Dracula – and was featured heavily in Abigail, which not only featured a ballerina hit woman but made her a teenage vampire too – and a tiresome backstory in which Evil Grandad (Gabriel Byrne) kills Good Dad (David Castaneda) because two factions of assassins are at odds, and Eve (Victoria Conte) somehow winds up being raised by Wick’s faction to Ruska Roma, under a ballet mistress (Anjelica Huston) with JW regulars Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick about.
We get brutal ballet training – those injured toes hurt more onscreen than any of the broken bones and bullet hits – and a sideswipe to assassination (or bodyguarding) with Eve (now Ana de Armas) graduating by surviving a test with a used-up hit woman (‘you in ten years time’) which begs the question of how the Ruska Roma are any better than Byrne’s rule-breaking baddies. Eve has a few missions/set-pieces, then goes after the villains – who are a whole mountain community. Len Wiseman, a very bland action director, handles this one with perhaps extensive assist from Chad Strahelski to explain the occasional bursts of wit (a TV montage of Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges) and decent fighting between wedges of dreary, meaningless exposition and top-this-absurdity battles involving ice skates, kitchenware, flamethrowers, a firehose etc. Anne Parillaud is wittily cast as Prague’s answer to Ian McShane, but nothing is made of her – she’d have been better employed in the role you’d say Huston walks through if she weren’t sitting down all the time.
De Armas – replacing Unity Phelan, who introduced the character in John Wick Parabellum – seems to be riffing on her cameo role from No Time to Die, and isn’t as much fun as she ought to be … the USP of Ballerina ought to be de Armas in fabulous frocks doing action but she’s mostly in drab (fireproof, we hope) long coats.
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