Ballerina review
Director: Len Wiseman
Writers: Shay Hatten
Stars: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Reddick, and Norman Reedus
Running Time: 125 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
Awkwardly marketed as From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, you’d be forgiven for allowing a smidgen of cynicism to creep into your perception of the John Wick franchise's fifth installment, one neither directed by series stalwart Chad Stahelski (the most influential action director of the past fifteen years) or starring Keanu Reeves in the lead role as the eponymous crowd puncher. Yet even if the prospect of Len Wiseman directing and Keanu Reeves being retained in a supporting role inspires little confidence, the collaborative oversight of producer Chad Stahelski ensures that the high water mark for John Wick’s standard of visual quality is thankfully maintained.
It starts with Ana de Armas, who brings a terrific and fresh physical presence to a role too often been monopolised by tall men. At five foot six, Armas plays trained Ruska Roma assassin Eve Macarro, the daughter of a murdered father, whose tragic backstory serves as suitable revenge movie fodder, and whose physical difference to the majority of men she fights offers audiences new and creative possibles for those extensive close quarter combat scenes John Wick fans have come to expect. She strides the perfect line between venerability and invulnerability, as someone able to take punches with resilience but also to emote the tough reality of standing back up in a movie that consistently beats you to the floor. In an early nightclub scene (by now a John Wick motif), she wears a blood-red sequin dress, housing weapons under the hemline, fighting reams of trained killers in a refrigerated ice party. Mixing brutal, high-impact choreography with the delicate dance of fighting targets physically larger, adds an entirely addictive pleasure to each action sequence – the requirement of Macarro to overcome human obstacles with both violence and ingenuity simultaneously. The result is a wildly thrilling scene of slipping heels, thunderous throw-downs, and crafty decision-making.
“it’s the stunts that tell you the story, not the story that brings you the stunts.”
Maintaining such high-quality action scenes is no small achievement, yet as Marcarro tracks down a pseudo-religious assassination tribe in the Austrian mountains, lead by a villain appropriately titled The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), I’m reminded how wonderfully silly this franchise is willing to be while treating it’s physical combat scenes with the hyper-serious craft of a prestige movie. If the film’s inspiration is under any doubt, during a scene set in returning location the New York Continental, when Marcarro uses a remote control to kill another foot-soldier, the TV channels change behind her, eventually landing on Buster Keaton performing that infamous Steamboat Bill, Jr. house stunt. It’s a nod to the core of John Wick’s entertainment principle – it’s the stunts that tell you the story, not the story that brings you the stunts. You will get to know Eve Macarro not by how she talks, but by how she moves, how she fights, how she survives.
Plot isn’t as important tone – this series has the intelligence to deliver high-octane, adult action film-making that explicates character through violence, yet most importantly - not senseless violence, but violence grounded in a (albeit wacky) set of moral guidelines. By laying out hard rules within its universe of expanding locations and characters, the world of John Wick manages to stop its world-building from collapsing by reminding us that even here, in the land of sweeping bullet death, there are boundaries. This series has always reveled in playing with old-fashioned analog technology, depicting how the hierarchy of assassins operates in a Luddite environment – the gleeful idea of a 1950’s style switchboard operator being the conduit for how you put a price on someone’s head. These are the finely chosen details that remind us the tone for this hyper-violence is one disconnected from our own reality, that in an ascetically pleasing way, we can enjoy the cathartic feminist rage as one not representative of the real world we live in.
The pleasure of watching Armas push through ever-escalating difficulties is not be underestimated, the theory being we always enjoy watching a flawed heroine, who bruises and feels pain, as opposed to another Chuck Norris-esque tank archetype, who feels nothing and houses no faults. Armas’ pain-laced expressiveness between the kicks is the key, each small human moment of her deciding to continue fighting even in the most entertainingly absurd situations. In a highlight, we’re treated to a lengthy flamethrower battle that is outrageously fun and easily stands as the best use of said weapon in cinema history – each wall of flame searing the skin of our heroine as she slides across a vehicle bonnet and calculates her next move. These are the reasons we watch John Wick movies.
In a fine act of feminist action cinema, we are gratefully delivered no love interest, no requirement for a romantic relationship, no necessity for either robotic emptiness nor emotional overburdence – here our heroine gets to be both real and not, a definitive combination of brutality and femininity. This is stunts-as-character film-making, and it doesn’t stop for trite character reductionism or hearken back to the past indiscretions of female action cinema, those too entrenched in Hollywood’s patriarchal ruling class, who too often reached into traditionalism instead of pushing ahead towards something more independently minded. If Ballerina tells us anything, it’s that Ana de Armas can lead the genre into more exciting possibilities.