Cast: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Reddick, Norman Reedus, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ian McShane & Keanu Reeves ...
Cast: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Reddick, Norman Reedus, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ian McShane & Keanu Reeves
Director: Len Wiseman
This is what everybody feared when John
Wick was exceptionally well-received, and it has finally happened, a thing most
of us didn’t want. But, it certainly doesn’t possess the overall tonality and
set-pieces that John Wick is known for, but as a spin-off, this works well
enough.
The performances are something John Wick
does way, way, way better than this: the performances in this feel largely
robotic. The film fails on an emotional level, not that there needs to be any
sentimentality for a film to be good; it’s because of this that the characters
rarely feel convincing, or relatable in any way whatsoever. It’s hard to care
about the characters, every character is blatantly two-dimensional, with no
time invested in them.
The direction is mediocre at best, with it
ticking off every “action-movie director” requirement there has ever been. The
direction feels lethargic, with no sense of motivation, and that might be
largely due to the under-cooked (if cooked at all!) screenplay, which feels
like a violent cashgrab.
The set-pieces aren’t anywhere near John
Wick’s exhilarating set-pieces — they feel very underwhelming. The set-pieces
don’t try to reinvent, or even do something that isn’t so beaten to death —
it’s just what’s always been done and will continue to be done for as long as
films are made. The set-pieces, while they look good and sound good, are
extremely lackluster, possessing a very lax attitude. The cinematography is one
of the highs of the film, with the cinematography being crisp, enunciated very
well by the neon lighting that has become, more or less, the staple look of any
John Wick rip-off.
The storyline is a very basic one, but
there have been moments in the past where a film which follows a very beaten to
death storyline, does something different with it, and ends up being the
highlight of the whole sub-genre (Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His
Wife and Her Lover is one such film) and follows every beat that had
built this micro-genre in the past, and does everything well enough for it to
be a commercial success, just enough for them to churn out one more of these,
staining a film series highly regarded amongst the niche.
Ana de Armas is just fine in this role; she
brings nothing to the role that hasn’t been done before. Keanu Reeves seems so
uninterested in this that it’s hard to cheer when he comes on screen. His
performance in this feels forced, very uncomfortably so. Norman Reedus is in
this for just ten or so minutes, and his performance is also just okay.
Ballerina is a just okayish film that won’t go down in history as one of the good-spin off, neither will it go down in history as one of the bad-ones, it’ll just be known (if at all) as one of the ones that was just there.
-By Ravit Mishra
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