"Ballerina": review

L (facing away): Ana de Armas as Eve; R: Keanu Reeves as John Wick, who understands revenge

I took time out from binge-watching the TV series "Psych" (review pending—I'm currently in Season 4 of 8) to watch Len Wiseman's "Ballerina," often subtitled "From the World of John Wick." The movie stars Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Reddick (in his final screen appearance), Norman Reedus, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ian McShane, and Keanu Reeves. It also contains a quick cameo by Anne Parillaud, the star of the original Luc Besson actioner "Nikita" from 1990.

"Ballerina" follows the story of Eve Macarro, a girl whose highly trained father (David Castañeda) was killed in front of her by a cult led by the Chancellor (Byrne). Eve is picked up by Winston (McShane) of the Ruska Roma, a society that trains children over years to become talented, resourceful assassins who eventually take their places in a global network of killers. The plot is a fairly simple one, showing us Eve's brutal training (including a gun-assembly scene straight out of the late-90s Korean action-drama "Shiri") under the owlish gaze of the Director (Huston) and her harsh-but-fair mentor Nogi (Duncan-Brewster). Eve is constantly reminded that women are at a physical disadvantage in any fight with men, so she must learn to use her wits and her own individual advantages, as a woman, to win fights. At the Ruska Roma, men and women spar together all the time, with both sexes encouraged not to hold back. When Eve attains a high enough level, she gets a huge, identifying tattoo on her back with the Latin phrase Lux in Tenebris—Light in Darkness—above her shoulder blades. (You'll recall John Wick's tattoo: Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat, or "Fortune favors the bold."

Eve has never forgotten that this cult, known by its cruciform wrist scars, killed her father and is the reason why she never knew her big sister, presumed dead. As Eve trains, her desire for revenge proves to be a great motivator, and despite the Director's command not to seek revenge against this cult, whose Chancellor is still alive, Eve ignores the Director and sets off on her own to locate the cult's base and kill the Chancellor. This prompts the Director to send John Wick, the Baba Yaga, after Eve to stop her because the Ruska Roma and this cult have coexisted for a thousand years, and killing the Chancellor would mean all-out war between the two societies. Eve uses her resources to find out where the cult's base is located (it's in a real-life city called Hallstatt, in Austria), and she sets out to kill the Chancellor. Along the way, she meets a former cult member who is trying to escape with his daughter, and she discovers her missing sister is alive and part of the cult. In the end, though, Eve must confront John Wick, who has been tasked with killing her if she refuses to drop her vendetta.

"Ballerina" is a bit of cotton-candy entertainment—there and gone, and having little in the way of substance. It's a spinoff movie; John Wick is only a minor, bookend character in this story, appearing near the beginning and again at the end. When Eve first meets him, she is still a starry-eyed trainee who has heard stories and legends about the Baba Yaga (Wick's bizarre nickname: Baba Yaga, something like a viciously wicked or weirdly benevolent forest spirit from Slavic lore, is traditionally female); Wick, world-weary, advises Eve not to follow the path of the Ruska Roma and revenge, but the young lady has made her choice. When Wick and Eve meet again, it is in the midst of much less positive circumstances, and Wick very quickly proves to be Eve's superior in every way.

"Ballerina" seems to have heard the complaints about Mary Sues and girl-bosses. Eve's training is depicted as brutal—a long litany of failures punctuated by occasional, but significant, successes, with Eve's grit seeing her through to each new stage in her development. Even after graduating from the Ruska Roma, Eve still has to work hard when fighting teams of men; her fights often feature plenty of feminine grunting and screaming. The fight choreography itself is fairly on par with what you'd expect from a regular John Wick film, and the spinoff's action is enjoyable if, as with the main films, you suspend your critical faculties with regard to the laws of physics. There's one scene in particular in which Eve traps a guy behind a large, metal door; she's also stuck a grenade behind the door, which she uses as a shield. The enemy combatant is blown to bloody shreds, but the door moves not an inch, which strikes me as implausible with all of that overpressure from the exploding grenade. (Eve's feet and ankles also suffer no damage from that explosion.) I could go on and on about the problems with the movie's physics, but when you watch a John Wick movie, you know the action is going to be cartoonish and silly.

Ana de Armas has proven to be a talented actress; she's Spanish-Cuban (dual citizen), and her English has improved greatly over the years. She still has an accent, though, which makes it weird when we transition from young Eve—who speaks with a perfectly American accent—to the mature Eve who now speaks with a distinctly Spanish accent. Come to think of it, the town of Hallstat is depicted as filled with cult-member families who all seem to yell tactical instructions to each other mostly in English rather than in German (only one cultist, played by the always-reliable Swiss actor/stuntman Daniel Bernhardt, takes time out to say "Verdammte Sheiße!"—"Goddamn shit!"—at one point). And Gabriel Byrne as the Chancellor, the head of this cult, makes no effort at all to speak German but is, instead, his usual Irish  (but English-accented) self. Anjelica Huston as the Director speaks with something approaching a Russian accent, but I was more distracted by the extremity of the plastic-surgery work that had been done to her face. When will actors and actresses learn that we, the audience, can easily see these vain attempts to hide the ravages of time? I admire Justine Bateman, a rare Hollywood conservative who advocates natural aging, all the more.

What else is there to say about such a thinly plotted revenge movie? If you've seen the preview trailers, you've already guessed how three-quarters of the plot is going to go, and sure enough, the movie itself follows that plot to the letter. Per the John Wick tradition, the entertainment comes not from knowing the story's outcome but in watching the various creative ways in which the bad guys die—a double-tap to the head, an axe to the face, or multiple stabs to the armpits and through the clavicular region.

The town of Hallstatt was a good sport to let its good name be tarnished for cinematic purposes. According to the movie's mythology, the entire town is filled to the brim with cult members, with everyone of fighting age picking up a weapon to face off against the rampaging Eve. While I won't reveal how the film concludes, I'm sure you can guess, and one big question is what shape the ensuing war between this cult and the Ruska Roma must have taken. This seems like the sort of plot point that might lead to a sequel.

In all, I thought "Ballerina" (named for the ballet program that the distaff half of the Ruska Roma goes through because of some ancient, sexist notion that all girls love to dance) was a perfectly serviceable action movie—entertaining as long as you keep your expectations well managed. As with most of the Wick films, I could see many aspects of the story that could have been improved with better writing and characterization. That said, I can't fault the way the action choreography was directed. If nothing else, the film was well paced and never boring. Watch it if you have nothing else to do. Even inside "the world of John Wick," this light and fluffy spinoff has little to no impact on the larger story.