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.
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