Production was beset by reshoot rumours, with the franchise’s original director Chad Stahelski dragged back in to oversee them in place of new man Len Wiseman, and the film’s release was delayed by a year.
What a relief then, to find that Ballerina is actually great fun, a propulsive, pulpy gun-fu joy that revels in the things the early John Wick did so well: stunts and absurd world-building.
And there is Keanu Reeves, back (quite a bit) as Wick himself, placing the events of this film firmly in the same timeline as 2019’s third instalment (there have been four) and even giving us a face-off between Wick and our new protagonist, the ballerina herself, played by Ana de Armas.
The film opens with an over-long flashback where we see a young Eve with her father, his death at the hands of The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) and her foray into the Ruska Roma, a criminal organisation that trains dancers to be deadly weapons (why? Who knows).
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina (Photo: Lionsgate/Larry D Horricks)
Now an adult and in pursuit of the “tribe” who killed her dad, identifiable only by the “X” scars on their wrists, Eve finds herself in cahoots with Daniel (The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus), a killer trying to protect his young daughter Ella from a life of crime – an unsubtle mirroring of Eve’s own childhood trauma.
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The plot is both thin and overly complex, and the dialogue is as weak as ever, but who cares when you have a film with this much affection for pure, imaginative action sequences? There are hand grenades exploding mere inches away on the other side of iron doors, knife-gun hybrids used in combat with surprisingly belligerent German chefs, and fireballs obstructed by garden hoses.
De Armas approaches the whole thing with a deadly seriousness that the material doesn’t remotely warrant but that suits the franchise perfectly. They may have swapped out a man for a woman (cue a few silly nods to feminism: Eve’s mentor insists she “fight like a girl” and she kicks her opponent in the balls), but the tone is the same: enthusiastically, gravely nonsensical.
In cinemas from 7 June
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