Ballerina has no faith in itself or us, the audience. The script has no faith in its character. Worse, Len Wiseman, the director, has no faith in his vision. But the worst of the worst is how for chunks of the movie everyone seems to have no faith in the star Ana de Armas.
Even the title reeks of diffidence. Depending on where you are, or what site you visit, the movie is either Ballerina or From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. A mouthful of a title, to be sure, but the real crime is how unlike, say, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down a Mountain, it has no flow. It is a bald-face cowardly attempt to get butts in seats because these fools can’t figure out how to sell Ana de Armas as a bad-ass killer ballerina.
It is almost unfair to compare Ballerina to the John Wick franchise. Especially considering that Wiseman has so clearly tried to make Ballerina its own thing. Except both the title and the inclusion of Angelica Houston, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, and Lance Reddick reprising their John Wick roles, makes it impossible not to compare the two entities in some fashion.
But in the end, what damns Ballerina is the way it fumbles its way through its story and tries so hard to build a world that the John Wick movies so effortlessly laid out. The difference is that Shay Hatten’s script laboriously shows us the rules and explains them because, for anything to matter, you must understand them. Herein lies the movie’s utmost major failing- it’s got nothing but plot on its brain.
It’s a pity because there are moments where the action is so alive, so breathtakingly goofy or pragmatically violent that you’re left disappointed when de Armas has to go back to serving the plot. Look, a movie where Ana de Armas fights dudes with ice skates-not wearing them, but with them, should be something I yell at you to see until my face goes tomato red. Alas, while that scene is awesome, it is also amidst some truly insipid bullshit.
Wiseman and Hatten dither about in the most annoying ways of trying to set up de Armas’s Eve as a tortured soul. But they can’t even do that. Unlike Wick, Eve is not an assassin. The ballerinas of the Ruska Roma, led by the Director (Houston) are bodyguards.
You would assume that the inciting incident in Ballerina revolves around one of Eve’s clients. Or perhaps maybe something happens with Tatiana (Julie Doghterty), a fellow ballerina and friend to Eve who leaves the program during training. Wiseman and Hatten, sneaky devils that they are, instead go with Eve being obsessed with finding the men who killed her father before her very eyes when she was but a child.
She soon learns that these men are part of a cult that practices anarchy; they kill without rules. Unlike the other tribes in the John Wick world, they follow no rules, except, of course, they do. Had the cult been truly anarchic, THEN Ballerina might have been interesting.
Making Eve a bodyguard instead of an assassin feels like a useless tweak. We spend the first part of Ballerina observing how Eve is a ruthless protector-which is never really touched on again, as for the rest of the movie, she is merely out for her own benefit. Of course, Hatten’s script briefly gives her a body to guard, a little girl, Ava (Ella Pine). That’s right, Wiseman and Hatten looked at the John Wick landscape and said, “What if we add a little girl to the mix?”
I suppose they were trying to be clever by subliminally suggesting to the audience that, since John Wick killed the dog, we might think the child is in danger. Except anyone who has ever seen A.) a Len Wiseman movie, or B.) a movie from a major Hollywood studio, knows that that kid is as safe as houses. Despite the young Pine’s doggedly good performance, she is merely more padding in a movie so full of people it has no idea what to do with.
Hatten’s script never seems to have a handle on who Eve is or what drives her. Halfway through the film, I was hard pressed to understand what drove her. Intellectually, I understand it’s the obsession of finding out where the cult is, but neither the cult itself nor her obsession ever really resonates.
None of this is helped by how Wiseman and Roman Lacourbas’s camera lacks visual panache. Lacourba lenses Ballerina with all the flair of a made-for-TV movie. At times, he and Wiseman will stumble into greatness, a fight scene at the club where Eve is protecting a young charge, the one and only time we see her doing the job for which she is trained, is a promise that the film never really fulfills. A shame, as the scene is a dizzying delight of excess and craft.
But so often, Wiseman and Hatten trip themselves up by trying to be clever. It becomes glaringly obvious that the script was never meant to be part of the John Wick universe and that the two men were forced to Frankenstein the material to make it fit. The result is a half-assed piece of entertainment that had it had a few more fun moments, I would be writing a very different review.
Ballerina is a movie that has reliable actors like Gabriel Byrne as the Chancellor, the leader of the cult, Norman Reedus as the Chancellor’s son, and expat who does nothing with them. Neither of these men has a moment where they seem to be relishing the words, or even having all that much fun. The feeling was mutual.
De Armas is an actor, like Alexandra Daddario, Sydney Sweeney, or Salma Hayek, in which few directors seem sure of what to do with. Occasionally, one will figure it out, and we’ll get a glimpse such as the infamous scene in No Time to Die. Ironically, Blonde, the controversial 2022 Marilyn Monroe biopic, is one of the few films that let de Armas really cook with all-out gas. Her Marilyn is a blisteringly, no-holds-barred performance, which, whatever you may feel about the movie, her performance is so searing that it is impossible to forget. A near tonal opposite to her Eve, which feels at the best of times like a half-formed idea.
But man, does she try. De Armas kicks, snarls, and fights her way through every scene, and when she’s allowed to be unleashed Ballerina, while no John Wick, is having a great time at the movies. Yet, Wiseman finds ways of undermining de Armas even in these moments. Throughout the movie, she will do these little things, after a fight, finishing moves, if you will, and they add such a wonderful little kick that had the fight been better, they would be a cherry on top as opposed to a muted but effective flourish.
Lacourbas and Wiseman frame the fights in a way that we understand what’s going on, but there’s no joy in the filming, no breathless wonderment at movement. The John Wick movies would tell you a lot in a few scenes; whereas Wisemna and Lacourbas never seem to know when to stop telling us and simply show us. Ballerina is a flawed but enjoyable movie, but the most exasperating aspect is how it keeps trying to tell us things instead of showing us anything.
Near the end of the film, there is a sequence that has Eve going ham on the bad guys with a flamethrower. I can’t front, this was a highlight of the movie. But then it keeps going, on and on, and after a while, the epicness of de Armas with a flamethrower becomes almost tedious. But then she gets a firehose to fight a bad guy who has a flame thrower and it’s so damn awesome I wanted to cry. But had it happened five minutes earlier in Ballerina, it would have been out of this world.
Images courtesy of Lionsgate
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