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The ever-expanding John Wick franchise is founded on our suspension of disbelief. The first 2014 entry convinced the audience to buy that Keanu Reeves’ assassin would go to pieces over a puppy. Subsequent installments have attested that assassins abide by strict rules of decorum, that they’ve founded their own assassins’ AAA which allows access to fine hotels around the globe, that they coordinate their dastardly commerce through a switchboard of rockabilly phone operators.
The series’ bleak and stylish bravado has swept us along for four films thus far and mostly carries us through this spinoff prequel with a klutzy title, “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,” directed by Len Wiseman from a script by Shay Hatten. But I got tripped up by its opening sequence in which a death squad invades a family’s home and the father (David Castañeda) doesn’t mind that his young daughter, Eve (Victoria Comte), is lugging around a noisy music box. “Stay quiet,” he whispers. But the darned toy has been blaring “Swan Lake” since “Ballerina” started and, to our annoyance, it’ll tinkle a few more times.
That sort of nitpicky critique — and trust me, “Ballerina’s” plot inspires plenty of them — can be parried by an obvious rebuttal. Of all the absurdity in these films, that’s your issue? That comeback has a point. In John Wick’s universe, you’re in for a penny, in for a pound (of flesh). Each difficult decision leads to an even worse one, with no chance of escape.
“Did you think that you could just walk away?” Gabriel Byrne’s new heavy, the Chancellor, hisses to Castañeda’s doomed daddy as Eve watches in horror. If you’ve seen any of these movies (which, even at their flimsiest, are still better than most action fare), you don’t need that question asked or answered. In “Ballerina,” you don’t really want anyone to talk at all. Several times during the course of watching the movie, I wrote in my notepad: This dialogue is going to kill me.
“The fear and insecurity were in my favor,” Ana de Armas says of playing Marilyn Monroe. That, coupled with the sheer exhaustion of filming, helped the actor get inside the icon’s head.
All you really need to know is that “Ballerina” is set before the events of 2023’s “John Wick: Chapter 4” and that adult Eve (Ana de Armas) wants vengeance. Her quest to get it will have her tangling with Norman Reedus and Catalina Sandino Moreno as scarred members of the Chancellor’s tribe, as well as testing the trust of Ian McShane’s Winston, who returns as the manager of the underworld’s Continental Hotel, alongside Lance Reddick’s concierge, Charon, in his final role. There’s also a cameo from Reeves’ John Wick himself, here functioning as Eve’s fairy godmurderer.
As an angry orphan, Eve was taken in by Anjelica Huston’s Director, who runs a co-ed academy of fledgling mercenaries called the Ruska Roma. (Huston’s character debuted in “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” in which she revealed that Wick himself was a pupil.) Resplendent in finery that makes her resemble a gilded black widow spider, the Director coaches kids to dance and brawl until they bleed. As maternal figures go, she doesn’t get much warmer than advising Eve to take care of a toe injury “before you get sepsis and we have to cut off your foot.”
Eve is a good student and De Armas is a convincing killer. (An early fight-to-the-death against a spitfire Rila Fukushima is over too soon.) There’s a scene where an instructor, Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), lectures Eve to “fight like a girl” and she immediately hits her male opponent in the nads. A few scenes later, Eve shoots some other guy in the crotch and he bleats a funny little squeal. The Oscar nominee gives her physical all to the movie and, as a thank you, “Ballerina” lets her stay mostly silent so its leaden lines don’t weigh down her performance. Fortunately, De Armas has expressive eyes.
A little over a decade ago, actresses in these kind of movies were handcuffed to the role of the damsel in distress. Hollywood transitioned out of that trope by letting women fight as long as they fought other women, conveniently inserting one bad girl for every heroine. Thankfully, that liminal stage is also now passé.
But even by today’s standards, it’s impressive how often men get to kick De Armas in the kidneys. Her willowy frame takes a tremendous battering as brutes slam her into tables and through walls. In one rousing moment, she and her combatant greedily grab and smash plate after plate after plate on each other’s heads. (Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard’s percussive score pairs well with a soundscape of shattering glass.) I didn’t tally Eve’s corpses, but her body count appears to be roughly as high as Wick’s and she wasn’t even forced to do it in heels. She favors sensible boots accessorized with a grenade belt.
If you’ve ever watched some chiseled action hero coolly taking out bad guys onscreen and thought to yourself, “How hard could that be?”
Her ballerina background, however, is fairly extraneous, even with De Armas made to stare solemnly at that blasted music box during her rare moments of rest. Dance has simply given Eve a canny sense of timing that allows her to hand someone a grenade and duck before it explodes. As ever, the fight choreography is fantastic, especially when Eve arrives in a Stepford-esque ski chalet town where every husband, wife and child has been trained in combat. There in the snow, she’s tasked to swing heavy steel hooks on slippery floors and wield an ice skate like a knife.
With the plot such a snooze, we’re grateful that each fracas is creatively staged, even one we witness only in its aftermath, as Eve ditches two fresh corpses in a men’s room and retraces her steps to her car, following her trail of victims like breadcrumbs in a forest. As a capper, right when Eve starts to drive away, there’s a neat crane move with a motivation I don’t want to spoil.
The franchise has always excelled at mixing symbolism into its bloodshed. I’m still swooning over the sequence in the last film in which John Wick’s Sisyphean struggle to quit his job for good was channeled into an extended battle: fighting up six flights of stairs, tumbling down and punching his way back to the top. Verbally, “Ballerina” repeats its themes ad nauseum. People are always going on about dualities: choice versus fate, protection versus destruction, stay versus go. But whether Eve’s inner black swan will win out over her white one is never in question. Instead, that polarity motif is more thrillingly captured when Eve fends off a flamethrower with a fire hose.
If you really care (and I never did), the Chancellor is fixated on adopting children he can mold into a militia. He’ll apparently risk dozens of full-grown proteges for one unproven tot. Not being able to abduct grade-schoolers is an affront to his clan’s heritage. You imagine him brandishing a Don’t Tread on Me flag even before Eve’s revenge crusade is likened to cutting the head off a snake.
It doesn’t matter if Eve succeeds, the Chancellor insists, claiming that “the system will continue as it has for the last 1,000 years.” Sure, go ahead and ask us to believe that John Wick’s lineage stretches back to Beowulf, the Battle of Hastings and the Great Schism. Sounds like the studio has another spinoff prequel in mind: “John Wick: The First Crusade.”
'From the World of John Wick: Ballerina'
Rated: R, for strong/bloody violence throughout, and language
Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes
Playing: In wide release Friday, June 6
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