One thing I really like about Ballerina is the scene in which our protagonist Eve finds an arms dealer to equip her with all the various weaponry she’ll need to continue her quest of ultimate vengeance. To explain why I like that scene so much would require me to spoil it, so I’ll save it for later.
Based on the trailers, I’d expected this just to be Ms John Wick. At this point, I’ve still only seen the first movie, so I wasn’t sure exactly what that would entail, but regardless, I was all for it. One of the most beautiful women in the world as a super assassin going to exotic locations, shooting, stabbing, judo- and flame-throwing a bunch of bad1 guys? What’s not to like?
And I’m delighted to report that the movie does indeed kick so much ass. It manages to include everything I’d expected from the first John Wick movie after hearing about them for so many years: shamelessly gratuitous hyper-violence, ridiculous world-building about clans of assassins who live by a strict code of honor, and beautiful cinematography surrounding its lengthy bouts of ass-kicking. Including, yes, a set piece inside an absurd purple-lit nightclub, this one full of walls and tables made of ice.
It also manages to include a good bit of what pleasantly surprised me with the first movie: a sense of restraint and economical storytelling. I don’t want to overstate that and give the wrong impression, since Ballerina is a lot more excessive than John Wick, and everything that that movie either implied or showed in flashback is explicitly shown here in a long origin sequence starting with Eve as a child and continuing through her training. But there’s still a sense that the movie knows exactly what it is and what’s important to this story, and it knows exactly how to make a simple story engaging enough that you’re not distracted by how simple it is.
Even more importantly, it wastes as little time as possible getting its story obligations out of the way and advancing to the next action set piece. There’s a great command of timing and pacing; the beginning does seem to drag on a bit, but you soon realize that it’s been putting all of the pieces into place, so that the entire last half of the movie can be practically uninterrupted action.
And a side effect of that command of timing is that the movie is surprisingly funny. There are no comic relief characters, and everyone plays it completely straight-faced throughout, but the action is choreographed so that scenes will have laugh-out-loud moments interspersed with all of the hyper-violence.2 It is unapologetically a “He done blowed up real good!” movie that remains aware of the point where all of the action just becomes silly, and it lets the audience enjoy the silliness for a beat before quickly reining things back.
I don’t know whether the rest of the franchise is as much bombastic fun as Ballerina is, but now I’m actually looking forward to diving back in and finding out for myself. Getting into specifics about my favorite scenes will require spoiling things. This is such a simple movie that there’s really not much to spoil, but I’d hate to ruin what made the scenes work so well for me.
So the setup, again, is that Eve has gone rogue and set off on her quest for vengeance, and she’s found a small shop, run by a lone guy who wants to remain Frank, which has a secret back room holding all kinds of advanced weaponry.
He starts by showing off a rifle and rattling off its specifications, pointing out all the different ways it can be and undoubtedly will be used later in the movie. At the exact moment that I thought, “Oh, this is the part of the movie for all the gun fetishists. I can just let my eyes and ears glaze over and let my mind wander a bit oh shit somebody shot holes in the door!“
The tiresome demo of gun stats — the most boring filler part of any action movie, second only to the car chase — gets interrupted in mid-sentence and instead launches into one of the best action sequences in the whole movie. Consisting mainly of Eve losing access to all of the rifles we’ve just seen, and having to improvise by taking out an entire pack of invaders by using a seemingly limitless supply of grenades. Because Ballerina is a movie that respects the audience’s time (more or less) and knows what we’re actually here to see vs. what action movie screenwriters tend to believe we’re here to see.
Runner-up for scene I really like happens earlier in the movie, after Eve has completed her training and initiation into the assassin’s guild or whatever. We skip forward a couple of months in time and finally get to see her in action on a “real” mission.
Except Ballerina skips ahead to the end of the mission, after she’s killed everybody and is just collecting her bounty and heading out. As she makes her way through the bathrooms and back rooms of what appears to be yet another New York nightclub, we see all the carnage she’s left behind. Glimpses of dead bodies strewn about, lying on the floor or partially hidden by toilets, from which she pulls various knives and such to reuse later. I’d appreciated the first John Wick’s mantra of “tell, don’t show” to build Wick up to almost mythical proportions, and this movie takes the “show, don’t tell” approach, quietly letting us know that she’s become a very, very lethal assassin.
And the movie ingeniously gets to have it both ways, too: as she’s driving away (revealing that she’d earlier smashed a guy into a wall with her car), she gets rammed out of nowhere by an attacker, launching into a fight that we do get to see. We don’t necessarily need to see Eve taking out a pack of nameless dudes in another drawn-out fight, but we do get to see an intense fight with a character that actually ends up mattering to the plot.
It all shows that Ballerina understands that even a spectacle-heavy action movie isn’t entirely about fight choreography and stunt work; it’s also about knowing exactly when to start and when to end a scene, and exactly how much story and character development you need to make all of the fight choreography and stunt work have the most impact.