You would be forgiven for expecting Ballerina, the long-awaited spin-off to the wildly successful John Wick action series starring Keanu Reeves as an ageing hitman, to be very bad.
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.
When the studio, Lionsgate, issued an unusual embargo statement that encouraged immediate “spoiler-free enthusiasm” but forbade “critical social sentiment” until much later, it left fans frantic that their favourite franchise was about to be decimated, like an idiot henchman at the mercy of Wick’s Glock 34.
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.
There are beautifully choreographed fight scenes in impossibly ornate nightclubs. There are nodding smiles from affable hotel manager Winston (Ian McShane).
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.
De Armas is Eve Macarro, a ballerina-turned-assassin whom we met briefly in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (where she was played by Unity Phelan).
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).
It is headed up in New York by The Director, played by Angelica Houston, who must deliver lines like “she made her choice” with a criminally bad Russian accent.
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.
This is followed by a series of deadly set pieces in an idyllic alpine village, with a twist so absurd it may well be the best and silliest scene you see on screen this year.
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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.
Keeping the budget reasonably low at $80m (£59m) was smart because it has stopped the expensive, overly produced bloated messes that sometimes beckon with similar films (think Reeves’s $225m (£166m) failure, 47 Ronin). My one gripe is that I’d like to have seen more actual ballet. Not incorporating some lethal pirouettes, preferably with some techno Tchaikovsky, into the existing fight scenes feels like a lost opportunity.
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.
If you’re a Wick superfan there’s plenty for you, from labyrinthine discussion of “the rules”, to underworld currencies, and 1000-year-old gang truces. If you’re new here, it’s still fun watching Reeves exclaim “Das vedanya” as if he were performing King Lear.
In cinemas from 7 June
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