Ballerina (June 6)

I should start by saying that this is my first entree into the John Wick franchise after however many movies there have been. I am vaguely aware that this is a much beloved set of films spanning over a decade of film making and that there are a lot of flowers for the stunts and combat choreography but honestly I think I’ve maybe seen a scene where someone eats a poisonous fish at a sushi stand once and that’s about it. I liked Ana de Armas’s cameo in that one Bond movie and also everything else she’s done is so cool and it’s a little bit funny to think that she and Keanu have been in a movie together before where she sort of seduces him in a home invasion film I guess?

Anyway, I wanted to see what looked like a blockbuster of the summer on opening weekend because it seemed like it would be fun but also like it would depart enough from the lore of the original films for me not to get too bogged down in backstory.

For the first half hour I couldn’t tell if this movie was just an excuse for combat sequences to follow one after the other and then I thought maybe that was one of the inside jokes of the John Wick movies in general and it was actually like a joke within a joke for her to be jumping in time by months into just another in medias res action sequence, but by the time we get really pumping in the second act, it feels like the writing has sufficiently matured Eve into a fully-fledged character with a moral code and compass. She’s kind of plucky and fights like a wolverine, because, as she’s been trained by the Rosca Roma or whatever they’re called, she needs to “change the rules of engagement” to suit her style of fighting, so you actually spend a lot of time in her initial “road test” missions watching her really push things into asymmetric warfare in her favor, which doesn’t quite feel Aristotelian or whatever in terms of audience sympathy, but it’s really fun to watch her get punched and get back up again so often.

There is this moment fairly early on where it seems like they’ve spliced together a scene from the first John Wick movie from a different angle using old actors but adding in Eve’s character, and she sort of talks to him during like a “lost scene” while he’s going on his merry way, which is kind of cool but also so many references to a movie I haven’t seen that it feels sort of meaningless, but they really make it work in the final act. I don’t have a lot of analogs to what they’ve done in terms of lending an A-list actor’s name and brief cameos into launching a new spinoff, but it just works.

The sequences with flamethrowers, grenades, the way she scavenges knives in the club’s penthouse, the way she’s interrupted during a hum-drum armory scene is all so inventive and subversive to the structure of the genre that has cropped up as a result of the success of the John Wick movies, but also they’ve found ways to breathe life into the should-be cramped politics of the “tribes”. It feels like the movie feints really quickly into the “baddies are actually victims” and “no one is simply all evil or all good” pretty early on, and there’s this point at which it seems like maybe the reactions from all the faction leaders of “you are in over your head on this one” when she asks after the people with the X-marks-the-spot-brands might mean something even more over-the-top than she’s expecting, like a double fake to a double fake, but it doesn’t quite go all the way to that. My pet theory from the second act that never materialized was that (spoiler) the “people with no rules” are a community of ex-assassins who just want to settle down and raise families in the Swiss Alps or whatever, and that they’re sort of like castaways or successful exits from the other tribes who kind of organically formed a tribe to provide protection for one another in their retirement, which is why they’re so savage about protecting their own and so savage about when their own attempt to leave the community, but also there seems like there’s this twisty element of the children of this community are being picked up by the other clans in order to train them into becoming Sparrows–so to speak–bent on hunting down and killing their very own without realizing it. So Eve’s hunt for her father’s killers is actually the destruction of a kind of utopia for people who, as Wick has mentioned several times in round-about ways, finally got out of the game, which would be kind of a tragic end, but also morally complex and whatever. Instead, it’s just a weird commune of guys with guns and not actually that many kids, which is fine, like maybe there’s more for the next sequel?

Which is all to say that I’ve been catfished by this weirdly popular genre of female assassin movie before (Salt (2010), Sucker Punch (2011), Atomic Blonde (2017), Red Sparrow (2018), Anna (2019), Black Widow (2021), etc.), but this one feels like it actually lands in a way that the others don’t because it’s borrowing the format and physicality from a different franchise but putting a twist on the femme fatale plot.