Ballerina is, on some level, a blatant cash grab, more so than the other John Wick movies, by virtue of being an interquel. It is an interquel because it needs to be set at a time when John Wick, the man you hire to kill the boogeyman, is alive, and by the end of the fourth movie John Wick is dead (spoilers for a movie from 2023, sorry). Trying to slot in a film between two other films in a sequence is ungainly at the best of times (the good people over at TVTropes have discerned a rather thorny continuity issue with this movie vis-a-vis the other movies in the series). But, for this movie, I choose to look at its continuity in the way I look at James Bond movie continuity, where the whole thing is malleable and something of a mess, and as such I will care about continuity about as much as the films will.
Ballerina contains within itself another iteration of the John Wick series’ spectacular worldbuilding. This series has the best worldbuilding I have ever seen that has not a single obvious supernatural element to it. By virtue of being set in a criminal underworld, there is room for all sorts of weird micro-societies and cultures, some of them bordering on a religion. The one that takes pride of place in this film is the one in which our protagonist is immersed. It is an all-female organization of assassins and bodyguards who, in addition to all their combat training, also have to learn to be first-class ballerinas. You see your main character, played by Ana de Armas, be grilled in her ballet technique intercut with her more obviously violent education, and by the end of it the stage on which she practices is covered in blood. Ballet as an art form is brutal on the body, as shown in previous John Wick movies as well as 2018’s Red Sparrow, and for that reason is so often juxtaposed with more violent endeavors. On an aesthetic level, it works as a juxtaposition between beauty and death, and the whole thing feels like something out of a fantasy novel, or even a Greek myth about the Amazons.
The Ruska Roma, the ballet/homicide organization that our protagonist, Eve Macarro, joins in the beginning of the film is confronted with an enemy that likewise feels like something out of a fantasy novel. This organization is a religious/homicidal cult whose raison d'être is shrouded in mystery (which is a polite way of saying somewhat vague, but it works) that has existed for centuries, and based in a town in the Austrian alps. In some ways, they are the perfect mirror of the Ruska Roma, also being fanatical and cold-blooded. Every little bit of world-building you get here is through character actions, rather than ham-handed exposition or hackneyed dialogue. You are finding out who these people are right alongside Eve, and the strangely impassioned but always scary behavior makes for a compelling villain.
An aside - there is a bit where the head of this cult in the Alps mentions that a leader of said cult has not had to flee in two hundred years - I would read the shit out of fan-fiction about this cult’s involvement in the Tyrolean Rebellion against Napoleon’s forces, because I am a fucking nerd.
The action here, as in all the other John Wick films, is spellbinding. There is the obligatory shoot-out in a nightclub, this time in New York. As familiar as such scenes are in this series, the film still justifies its presence by virtue of the use of the bright, contrasting colors used decoratively. You also get a good deal of mileage out of that town in Austria run by the cult; there is a well-done fight in a kitchen with use of kitchen utensils (in a manner far more creative than this year’s Novocaine). You will also get the most off-the-wall usage of flamethrowers I have ever seen in any film ever, as well as the most creative use of a hose I have ever seen in any film ever. The series has, fortunately, not devolved into cliché.
Ana de Armas brings a strong presence to her leading role as Eve Macarro. Eve is what I would imagine John Wick himself was like as a young assassin learning the ropes (and how to hang people with them) of the homicide business, but of course gender-swapped. Eve has to build up a tolerance of killing, something John Wick has had the entire run of his namesake series, so there is a trepidation here that has to be overcome. Her gender, of course, changes a lot. The most spectacular, and most poignant, of these is during her training in the Ruska Roma, where her superior tells her that she will be weaker and smaller than any man she fights, and she must always remember that. This immediately cuts to Eve fighting a man in a spar; to make up for the difference in size, she attacks his groin repeatedly, and he is clearly in incredible pain. Throughout the movie, you see a woman turning from someone relatively normal, albeit having gone through a tremendous loss, into an amazon who can dance.
Only a few days after I saw this movie, I read David Foster Wallace’s (no known relation to the author of this piece) essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, whose namesake essay is about his time on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. He finds a brochure aboard the ship with an essay-cum-advertisement by the acclaimed writer Frank Conroy. Wallace is quite perturbed by this essay, not because it isn’t good (on a craft level, he says, it is superb), but that nowhere it is disclosed that Conroy was paid for it. This essay, argues Wallace, is an advertisement pretending to be art:
“In the case of Frank Conroy's ‘essay,’ Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is at absolute best like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”
This is an argument that I think is worth thinking about in relation to big media franchises, of which John Wick has most certainly become in recent years. The purpose of a media franchise is to be enjoyed first, and then to advertise future works in the franchise for the ultimate financial gain of the franchise owner. John Wick, the man, the character portrayed by Keanu Reeves, is something of a modern folk hero, in what Henry Jenkins described as “a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” The question, then, are franchise films art? Is Ballerina art?
I would argue yes. So many great works of painting and sculpture are here in this world for us to appreciate because of the patronage of the wealthy; hell, the art on the Sistine Chapel is a prominent example. It bears mentioning here that Ballerina started out as an original project before being retrofitted into the John Wick universe. Like the great works of the Renaissance, Ballerina owes its existence to men of great wealth, but ultimately it has enough substance, enough meat on the bone, to be enjoyable.
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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
