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 (061925)
Ballerina is a sleek, efficient and visually
dazzling high voltage thriller. It is also known as: "From the World of John
Wick: Ballerina" and although this clunkier title might have brought in more
people, it is not nearly as catchy or memorable as the much shorter and to the
point shorter version.
The film
is never very original or creative, but Ballerina includes several of the most
memorable and exciting action scenes of the year. The fights are always very
well-choreographed, although they are not quite as par as the ones in Kill Bill 1
and 2 or your average Jet Lee or Jackie Chan film. But two of them in particular
absolutely
knocked my socks off and make the film very memorable. It has a fine cast including: Anna (Blade Runner 2049) De Armas, Anjelica (Prizzi’s
Honor) Houston, Gabriel (Miller’s Crossing) Byrne, Lance (John Wick) Reddick,
Norman (The Bike Riders) Reedus, Ian (Deadwood), McShane,
and Keanu (The Matrix) Reeves. It also has one other selling point: it includes several lovely dance
sequences (I know that’s not what most of the audience are going there for)
which occur while they are playing Tchaikovsky
I have a confession-I am not and have never been an excessively big John Wick
fan. I thought the films in the series I saw were competent but mindless
exercises in mayhem. But somehow this one impressed me a bit more and kept my
attention.
A lot of the film’s success has to do with the dynamic leading performance by
Ana De Armas, one of the most promising up and coming actresses along with Mia
Goth and Anya Taylor-Joy. I have seen her in both good films (Knives
Out, Blade Runner 2049), and bad ones (Deep
Water and Blonde for which she got an Academy
Award nom), but she always brings a little certain something extra to all of her
roles.
She’s always coming off as exotic, energetic and charismatic in everything she
does. I even liked her in the critically panned Knock Knock in which she first
costarred with Keanu Reeves as the ultimate teen femme fatale, who helps ruin a
happily married man’s life.
De Armas plays
Eve whose name has mystical significance because she gets into trouble going
against her parental figure and trying to gain forbidden knowledge. In an
Elektra-like origin, Eve sees her dad get assassinated. Then a group takes her
in and trains her to be both a skilled ballerina (hence the title) and a
skillful assassin. It turns out that the guy who put the hit on dad is head of a
real assassin group that peacefully coexists with the one she is in now. But if
she tries to get vengeance, she will be betraying her own group and risk
plunging them into war with the other gang. Since she lives in a perfect
environment for assassins this would be like being thrown out of Eden.
Eve gets shot several times and gets hit in the head dozens of times usually
with apparently lethal force. No normal human could survive all that and I am
not even sure Deadpool or Wolverine would make it out of all this carnage, Yet
the whole time I was laughing at the ridiculousness of it all and found myself
still rooting for the main character. Maybe it is because she was fighting to
save children, somehow a common motivation for female assassins in films.
Fortunately she is by far the most dynamic and likeable character in the film,
so the producers got the lead right.
Not surprisingly (considering the films title) Keanu Reeves also briefly returns
here as the master assassin and
martial artist, John Wick. He does not have much screen time, but he manages to
make his way into many
of the film’s best key scenes. Reeves have never had a great acting range, but
he is perfect for this role. He mostly just has to move well, point guns and act
cool. In fact he probably defines "cool" as well as anyone in any recent film and he is nearly as cool as
Alain Delon in Le Samourai and Clint Eastwood in The Good the Bad and The Ugly.
A technically better actor like John Lithgow or Philip Seymour Hoffman would
never have been good in the role.
I know everyone loves the Matrix, but for me his best film role
was in My Own Private Idaho.
Norman Reedus who played the coolest character in Watching Dead, also has a
small but integral role in the film. Here he plays another assassin who
technically is on the other side of Eve. But he still ends up as a quasi-hero
and makes a very strong impression in what could have been a forgettable throw
away small part.
As mentioned before, this has some of the best action scenes of the year. I
was especially impressed when Eve counteracts a rival assassin by squirting
water from a hose in the path of a flame thrower. This reminded me of the Iceman vs Pyro scene in
X-Men 3: The Last Stand. There is also a fight scene between Eve
and John Wick, John appears to be reluctantly and holding back, which is how it
should be since he is the star of the series. The fight ends as
anti-climactically as the main bout in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman but it is
still lots of fun.
No one will confuse this film with an important action masterpiece and it is
never as exciting or compelling as
Mad Max Fury Road
or
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga-another
clunky movie title. But
it does what it is supposed to do (which is to get the audience’s hearts pumping
very well. This film may be more of a product rather than a work of art, but it
does what it is supposed to do well enough.
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