From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

Yes, the stunts are always spectacular, but what makes the John Wick movies enthralling is the world, a parallel universe where rival international groups of assassins operate in ultra-elegant hotels and nightclubs without any interference from law enforcement or, well, reality. No matter. We’re not there to clock the believability. We’re there to enjoy the fantasy. Wouldn’t we all love to have a gold coin to check into one of the glamorous Continental hotels (it is bittersweet to see Lance Reddick in his last role), understanding that the unbreakable rule prohibiting killing anyone on the premises sometimes, like the bodies of the hotel guests, sometimes gets broken? Philip Ivey’s production design continues to entice and dazzle – more on that later. 

For those paying close attention, this movie “from the world of John Wick” takes place not after the most recent film, Chapter 4, but between the third and fourth installments, making it a “midquel.” John Wick (Keanu Reeves), the greatest assassin of all, who left the profession to live a normal live but came back in when the puppy his late wife left him was killed by the spoiled son of a crime kingpin. Unforgettably, when he first heard who it was that his son had offended, the brutal crime kingpin paled. “John wasn’t exactly the Boogeyman. He was the one you sent to kill the f-ing Boogeyman.”

We will see Wick in this film. But the title character in this chapter is Ana de Armas as Eve. We first see her as a child (Victoria Comte), holding onto a music box with a mechanical ballerina dancing to Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” She is sitting on a bench in some kind of institutional hallway and both she and the music box are smeared with blood. A character we know well, Winston, the founder of the Continental Hotels (rumble-voiced Ian McShane), asks if he can be honest with her. He knows her father has just been murdered (though after killing a dozen or so of the thugs sent to kill him), and he offers to take her to a school where she can study dance. She puts her hand in his, and they go to meet The Director (the heads of assassination organizations are known only by their titles), played with implacable sang-froid by Anjelica Huston. 

The Director runs a ballet company that trains, wait for it, ballerina assassins. “You will always be smaller. You will always be weaker,” the martial arts trainer tells now grown-up Eve. So, she has to learn to “fight like a girl,” to her opponent’s weight and strength against him.

There’s an important difference in Eve’s training, though. Her role will not be to kill people, though that will happen as she does her job, which is to protect those who are vulnerable to attack. Her first assignment (after her final test, with real bullets and real killing this time), is protecting the daughter of some powerful person with powerful enemies. The daughter, is, of course, dancing in a stunningly designed night club that appears to be made in part out of ice and snow. The dancing continues while Eve takes on the goons, wearing, of course, a spangly red gown. 

Then we jump ahead a few months to the aftermath of another of her assignments, as she retrieves her knives from a lot of dead bodies and we have to imagine what the fight was like. Not for long, because she is in another one very quickly.

And soon she is tossing something onto The Director’s desk. “Is there a reason you brought me a severed 

hand?” the Director asks cooly. There is a mark on the wrist Eve saw on the men who killed her father. So, now we are in revenge territory, with escalating stakes and even more escalating weapons and opponents. We will see some firepower, and I mean that literally.

There’s an intriguing shift from the ultra-urban sophistication of the settings to this point, the wonderful old-school phone and retro computer operators, who use vacuum tubes instead of email or texting to transmit documents, the sleek city skyline, the gracious, Victorian-influenced ballet offices. The last series of confrontations are in the kind of charming Bavarian-style village you might see in early Disney or Studio Ghibli, or perhaps in one of those carved wooden chalets with figures that swing in and out to tell you the barometric pressure. 

This group is overseen by The Chancellor (a stoney Gabriel Byrne). And even by John Wick standards (and yes, he shows up), there are some wowza confrontations, fights, and stunts.

The movie does not pretend to be anything but 80 percent style and stunts, 20 percent meaning, but that 20 percent hits on issues of choice and purpose that are as much as we need to give us character and motivation. Given the preposterousness of notions like a training academy for ballerina assassins and dialogue like “The pain is what drives you,” it’s good to have some grounding.

Coming next: An animated prequel about the Winston and Charon characters

Parents should know that this movie, like the other John Wick movies, has non-stop peril and violence including martial arts, knives, guns, grenades, flame-throwers, a car crash, and more. There was some graphic and disturbing images including parents killed or attempted to be killed in front of young children. Characters use strong language.

Family discussion: Who has a choice in this movie and how did they decide? Why are the operators in the Continental so low-tech?

If you like this, try: the other John Wick movies