Ballerina, the new John Wick movie, came out on my birthday and it feels like a movie made just for me. It is, as in the tradition of all the John Wicks, a slick-as-anything action movie with a strong emphasis on cool stunts, staging, and fight choreography. Ballerina also strips away a lot of the lore to get right at the franchise’s ass-kicking heart and instead of Keanu Reaves we now have Ana de Armas as our vengeful fighter. Fantastic.
But good ideas alone do not a good movie make (elsewise I’d have different opinions on Captain America: Brave New World). Fortunately, Ballerina delivers on all counts, all the while zeroing in on all those things that make John Wick — and action movies more broadly — so much fun.
Plot is a frivolity for Ballerina. A story is hardly why you’re watching this movie but there needs to be something so we care. Ballerina dutifully gives us a reason for Ana de Armas’ Eve to want to be an assassin and to go on her roaring rampage of revenge. It also nicely sets up a location for said rampage and a scenario wherein there would be plenty of bad guys to fall victim to Eve’s fisticuffs, guns, and sword (and flamethrower, and grenades, and plates). many ways it’s like a pulpy video game — the story is just enough to justify the mechanics and setting while offering enough character motivation to keep you engaged.
That video game comparison becomes especially apt when it comes to the movie’s structure. Each fight/encounter plays out almost like a video game level. There’s Eve’s first mission: the tutorial where we’re introduced to the style of action and fighting. Then additional levels start adding more twists on the formula: an encounter where the only weapons available are grenades, a level where the only weapon you have is a flamethrower, the level where you fight the protagonist from the last game. It sounds odd, to be sure, but just as Mega Man has elements of the Hero’s Journey, Ballerina using the structure of a video game lets it get inventive with its action. Remarkably, despite being five movies into a franchise, the John Wick series still manages to keep its fights feeling fresh.
Ballerina recognizes something that classic Hong Kong action cinema, like Police Story, knew: action is slapstick and slapstick is action. During a fight partway through the movie, a gun is lost amid a mess of dropped plates. Eve and her opponent duly look under each plate for the firearm, hitting each other over the head with every plate they check. It is a deeply silly sequence but the movie sells it in all its bizarreness, enough that when the pistol is finally uncovered there’s a beat where both stare at it for a moment before remembering that, yes, this is a life-and-death battle, not a competition about who can break the most plates. It’s darkly funny, in the way that a lot of action is, and the movie allows that funniness to coexist with its brutality.
I’m a sucker for a good action movie, especially one with a woman as its lead. Not only does Ballerina deliver on its premise, but it completely owns its more pulpy roots of Hong Kong action cinema, vaudevillian slapstick, and, yes, video games. It comes out feeling original in an era where cinematic action feels somewhat standardized in the Marvel fashion and big stunts mean watching Tom Cruise defy death in a Mission Impossible. Ballerina is a simple movie sure of itself and it’s so, so much fun.
Essays, Not Rants! 