John Wick | The Media Tourist

Ana de Armas puts a fiercely feminine stamp on the wild world of John Wick

Ballerina
Starring Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Angela Huston & Gabrielle Byrne
Directed by Len Wiseman
Rated R

In theaters Friday, June 6

A little girl named Eve who dreams of becoming a ballerina grows up on a path of vengeful retribution in this rock ‘em, sock’em John Wick spinoff. Cuban-born Ana de Armas stars, throwing herself with gusto into the super-stylish ultra-violence, astronomically high body count and epic levels of combative extermination that have become franchise cornerstones.

And it’s not a John Wick movie, per se, but John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is also around for a stone-faced cameo that feels less like a plot necessity and more like a calculated nod and bit of connective tissue for faithful fans, who’ve pushed the four previous films—the first of which debuted more than a decade ago—into the rarified billion-dollar box-office zone.

De Armas showed her kickass bona fides as a James Bond associate in a memorable scene from No Time to Die (2021), and she also made lasting impressions in two Blade Runners, Knives Out and Blonde, for which she was Oscar nominated in her starring role as Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. But she’s a newbie to the off-the-charts action of Wicki-world, and she makes a scorcher of a debut. I found myself constantly marveling at the high-level skills behind all the controlled chaos of the stunts, the elaborately staged destruction, and the fantastical implausibility of anyone—like Eve—actually surviving the punishments she endures, and dishes out, onscreen.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” she’s asked at one point.

On Eve’s back is a tattoo reading “Lux en Tenebris,” which is Latin for “Light in the Darkness.” Just in case you miss it, she’s a force of good, fighting a dark cabal of death-dealing bad guys. Good thing she knows how—as the end soundtrack song by the rock band Evanescence reminds us—to “Fight Like a Girl.”

There’s not a lot of highfalutin pretenses to gum up all the ballistics, the bloody brawling and exploding bodies, despite the movie’s stridently fem-centric focus on family, fathers, daughters and fateful choices. “Are we going to die?” a young girl asks her papa. Let’s just say, if you’re in this movie, the odds are somewhat stacked against you, by just about whatever means you might imagine, including pistols, assault rifles, knives, pickaxes, hammers and hand grenades. There’s even an extended duel between flame throwers, and a restaurant brawl that weaponizes dinner plates. The final third of the movie is set in a snowy Czech village where everyone—even kids—is trained to kill.

The cast will look familiar to John Wick fans, with role-reprising turns from Gabriel Bryne, Ian McShane, Angelica Houston and Lance Reddick. And hey, there’s The Living Dead’s Norman Reedus, as an assassin with a big bounty on his head. The movie is a teeming immersion into a shady Euro fantasia, a subcultural alt-universe of diabolical criminal underworlds, life-and-death codes of conduct and—as fans are aware—a hotel franchise, the Continental, that caters only to killers. Would you like some hollow-point bullets with your room service omelet?

“When you deal in blood, there must be rules,” we hear from Eve’s mentor at the Ruska Roma, the German criminal “tribe” of gypsies that adopt the tiny dancer and turn her into a lethal weapon. And indeed, there’s a lot of bloody bang for your movie buck in Ballerina, particularly in de Armas’ full-throttle performance as a woman who’ll stop at nothing to get her revenge—with a gun, a knife, a hammer, duct tape, a flamethrower or a fire hose—as she widens and feminizes the fierce, ferociously wild world of John Wick.

—Neil Pond

‘Wick’-ed, Dude!

Slam-bang revenge thriller puts Keanu Reeves back in action

John Wick

Starring Keanu Reeves

Rated R

He became a star in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Speed and The Matrix. But as the years clicked by and Hollywood kept churning out newer stars, Reeves—and his best movies—came to feel more and more like relics of a bygone era.

But not anymore, as the 50-year old actor stages one of the year’s most robust comebacks in a movie that defies many of Hollywood’s most basic conventions while covering some of its most familiar ground. In the action-packed John Wick, he plays a retired assassin drawn back into the underworld, where his lethal skills once struck fear into everyone unwise—or unfortunate—enough to cross his path.

After Wick, recovering from the death of his wife, is assailed by a group of young Russian mobsters, it reawakens his dormant killer instincts. What the thugs do his adorable new puppy and his ’69 Mustang has a lot to do with it, too.

Although the revenge/assassin plotline is a very familiar one, what makes John Wick feel so refreshingly original is how directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, and writer Derek Kolsatad, handle it. Stahelski, making his directorial debut after serving as Reeve’s stunt double on all the Matrix movies, funnels all his rough-and-tumble experience into a powerful, sometimes astonishing display of artfully orchestrated, staccato violence—close-rang shooting, grappling, kickboxing, punching, biting, bashing and stabbing. (Kudos as well to cinematographer Jonathan Sela, a veteran of Law Abiding Citizen, Die Hard, Max Payne and other adrenaline-fueled flicks.) It’s an all-out action junkie’s buffet, served up with the finessed intensity of a master chef. You’d never guess the director had never been “behind” a camera before.

Adrianne Palicki

Writer Kolstad’s story, although following a somewhat traditional trajectory, reveals some colorful original flourishes, especially the “world” of the movie: a teeming contemporary metropolis populated entirely by crooks, mobsters, hit men and those who provide them goods and services—a pulpy Sin City of hip nightclubs, elegant hotels and dens of iniquity fronting as churches, all of them stylishly, slavishly corrupt, although operating within a “code of honor.” It’s a place that the movie brings vividly, originally to life, with a supporting cast of Willem Dafoe, Alfie Allen (from Game of Thrones), Dean Winters, Ian McShane, Adrianne Palicki and Michael Nyqvist.

And Reeves—wow. For a man squarely at the mid-century mark, he’s amazingly athletic, and he absolutely “sells” every punch, blow, thud, slam, stab, wham and bam. He’s never been the most expressive of actors, but this role suits just him fine—mysterious, brooding, silent, sullen and super-cool, but capable of releasing an unstoppable torrent of deadly force in an instant.

At one point, Wick is warned about continuing his spree of vengeance, one that takes him deeper into his former life with at every turn. “You dip so much as a pinkie back into this pond,” he’s cautioned, “you might find something reaches out to drag you back down into the depths.”

But in he goes, and it’s quite a dive. Like a lot of action movies these days, this one ends in a way that suggests another might follow. That’s OK: I’d gladly return to John Wick’s (under)world for another adventure with an actor who’s obviously so ready, rejuvenated and rarin’ to go. It was a blast!

—Neil Pond, Parade & American Profile Magazines

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Tag Archives: John Wick

Movie Review: “Ballerina”

‘Wick’-ed, Dude!

Slam-bang revenge thriller puts Keanu Reeves back in action