Sunday, June 8, 2025

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

 


From the World of John Wick: Ballerina has the kinetic mayhem that has made the venerable series so addictive, but it lacks the elegant grace notes that made Wick's World so freaking entertaining, both unbelievably violent and surprisingly droll.
 
Director Len Wiseman certainly has an appealing star in Ana de Armas, whom I first noticed in her star turn as the lovable but gutsy caregiver in the original Knives Out (2019). In that film, she faced down an enraged family of entitled brats who resented being cut out of the patriarch's will while his wealth is bequeathed to his gobsmacked nurse (Armas).
 
In the latest Wick chapter, Armas's Eve doesn't let her exotic beauty detract, too much, from her deadliness -- she's all business as an orphan reared and trained by the doyenne of death, The Director (Anjelica Huston), in the same murky world of the Ruska Roma that created John Wick's Boogeyman. 
 
Eve is determined to avenge her father's death when she was a child, a hit by a clandestine cult led by a character called The Chancellor (a menacing Gabriel Byrne). Fan favorite Ian McShane has a cameo as Winston, the cagey manager of the New York Continental hotel, who rescued Eve from a shelter when she was a child. She visits Winston as an adult, and he, reluctantly, gives her information on a cult member (Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead) who is hiding in Poland. And she's off. 
 
Ballerina delivers the exotic scenery and runway fashions of previous entries but little of the knowing winks that lightened the murderous proceedings and amazing body count.
 
Keanu Reeves makes an appearance in Ballerina as Wick, but his part feels underwritten and, frankly, that is disappointing but understandable, I suppose. Wick's future in the franchise's narrative world is not certain; Reeves has said he doesn't have the knees for the balletic hand-to-hands that have driven the action in 80 percent of the series.

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