Whereas most modern media franchises seem to treat spinoffs as a matter of course, a perfunctory money-printing exercise born of contractual obligation, John Wick struck me as one of the rare, blessed exceptions. Maybe because it began so narrowly and then, with a sly restraint, started to tilt the camera toward the peripheral shadows; maybe because the franchise never seemed so much to expand as to reveal layered infrastructures that were already there.
The first of potentially many to come from this is “Ballerina”.
Off the bat, Len Wiseman is no Chad Stahelski in the director’s chair and while far from a curse, it does feel like it for a little while. There’s a hollow, uncanny tang to his light authorial touch despite digging out a paradoxical pleasure from the film’s weird, piecemeal weightlessness and it’s so ghost-directed to the point where you can practically see the spectral hands rearranging the chessboard between scenes (although Brave New World is worse in that regard); it’s far from a muscular build but one that was fit enough to pass as an invitation for Stahelski to build off of and improve….which is what happened during reshoots.
Just like the previous Wick films, the worldbuilding here isn’t so much worldbuilding in the traditional, expository sense but a slow erosion of boundaries, a trust that the viewer would keep up as the mythos sprawled like a map unrolling itself on a table during a crisis. This baroque elaboration of set-pieces lean harder into the underworld’s extravagant protocols teetering on the edge of magical realism but these richly adorned scenes with their ornate details still captivate without crossing into excess, preventing the sets and locales from merely becoming just decorative backgrounds. The only drawback to this lavish display is that it can at times feel overwhelming due to the sheer volume of details they attempt to cram in, leaving one a bit dizzy with the sensory overload; its barely disciplined with the excess here and that’s not something these movies are used to getting carried away with.
Maybe.
That doesn’t stop cinematographer Romain Lacourbas from constantly keeping the camera at a close distance to the action in what feels like an almost claustrophobic proximity, denying viewers the safe detachment of a god’s-eye view and instead making us complicit in the bloodbath. And said approach means the editing has no choice BUT to tighten up the longer the film progresses and the second it snaps ahold of momentum, it won’t let go willingly. The series’s signature visual aesthetic, all pounding neon and chiaroscuro slashings of shadow against lambent surfaces, remains fully intact as this film is fully awash in its lush, dangerous color palette, costumes might lack the elaborate embroidery or detailed beadwork as in previous years but still capture the essence of this universe and it barely manages to wrangle back control of its own pacing after the first act.
Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard once again compose together a musical score very befitting of the hyper-stylized pandemonium the world is known for, very Tchaikovsky-and Vivaldi-influenced, the sound design is a gleaming, brutalistic companion rendered with the precision of a jeweler assembling a bomb and this, if there’s any possible distillation of what the John Wick films do that not much else in their genre quite replicate, is the very definition of cocktail dress carnage in this series: when people praise these movies for its action sequences, it’s because of set-pieces like these. Some of the choreography lacks the lubricated precision of previous films, the gun-fu can get repetitive after a while and there’s a surprising lack of urgency, but by the time we get halfway through, the sequences are so raucous, its hard to fully knock it down.
Dare I say, there’s a weirdly perverse, almost balletic quality to that bedlam.
On this occasion, the usually vibrant array of characters we're accustomed to encountering in this universe is somewhat restrained but not too narrow; if they aren't driven by straightforward motivations, they embrace the eccentricities and quirks of their roles, and the cast revels in this playful exploration. I’ve always been so-so on Ana de Armas as an actress but I’ll say right now, this is probably the best I’ve seen from her since Knives Out; echoing and complimenting a calm composure with steely resolve and an almost animalistic fury when the situation calls for it and even the brief use of John Wick in this movie, bolstered by Keanu Reeves’ muted, gruff, gentle physicality as always, is handled masterfully, serving him as a mirror to our protagonist. Sucks that they dumbed down most of the dialogue and is occasionally cursed with janky ADR to boot.
Setting this between the events of Chapter 3 and 4 felt like the logical fulfillment of a promise whispered in the background of Chapter 3 but also one that has to settle with living in the massive shadow of its former brethren while being physically incapable of standing on its own. The journey isn’t “messy” per say but what little individuality this story contains might as well be the cinematic equivalent of a wobbly yet so-so executed fan service ballet; an identity crisis stuck between actively expanding the universe and repackaging some of the action’s greatest hits…..and it only JUST manages to land on its feet on the edge of a knife's blade. It’s the classic unstuffing of a narrative starting out lackluster, barely growing more dimensions to stand on as it goes on and ending in a manner that infrequently justifies its placement in this universe.
Harkening back to the kill-or-be-killed basics that made the first film a solid base to build upon is admirable but it is precisely in this deliberate regress, this nod toward primal narrative, that the movie exposes its own limitations as a strangely conservative entry. And it still isn’t up to par with the rest of the quadrilogy. Certainly, I might not mind how worn-out it appears—after all, these movies have never been known for complex storytelling—but it still lacks the captivating allure that initially pulled me into this cinematic universe. It’s not that minimalism itself is a flaw; rather, it’s how uninspired and even rote everything plays out in conjunction to and against its own structure and the emotional currents are all but muted, unable to invest the thinnest of motivations with mythic gravitas and kneecapping the protagonist into such a narrative stasis to where she ceaselessly avenges her own pain without ever truly transforming it or being transformed by it.
They do try to give Eve some dimensions beyond her rage, as her entanglement with another young girl and Norman Reedus’s character targeted by the same cult that took in Eve does symbolize the loss of her innocence and the life she used to have but not only does the movie barely take advantage of that plot thread, it’s one of many dramatic inconsistencies to both her character and the way her actions impact circumstances around her. It doesn’t expand on the Ruska Roma run by Anjelica Huston’s character or the cult that was introduced here and even the execution of the revenge plot itself feels more bare-boned and rudimentary than the first John Wick movie, riddled with the type of clichés one may find in any revenge-focused thriller.
Not to mention its insisted monologuing on fate doesn’t have many legs to stand on. Do I bear repeating myself further or do you get the point by now?
Despite the understandable annoyance behind this installment’s refusal to reinvent or even audaciously fiddle with the franchise’s DNA, one cannot ignore that Ballerina holds a disciplined reverence for the formula that forged it despite the cogs not being as sturdy as they once were. Even with that nagging sense that the clockwork mechanisms of the Wick universe are straining, there’s still an undeniable pleasure in how this film, and this world, honors the lineage it builds for itself as it pirouettes on shattered glass, arms outstretched for applause before the curtain even falls.
