The New Yorker:

Ana de Armas energizes this turbulent but thinned-out spinoff from the Keanu Reeves martial-arts franchise.

By Richard Brody

It’s been instructive to see “Ballerina,” which opens this week, so soon after the new “Mission: Impossible” installment. In the latter, it’s hard to top Tom Cruise’s intrepid stunt work, which reaches its zenith in a pair of extended sequences (one in a submarine, the other on biplanes), but the story, involving a diabolical scheme using A.I. to commandeer and launch the world’s nuclear weaponry, is a mere pretext. Going to “Mission: Impossible” for the story is like going to Casablanca for the waters. In contrast, “Ballerina”—like the four John Wick films that it’s spun off from—is, strangely, far better at story than at action.

The first John Wick film is the weakest, because the framework for the franchise was still unformed: a retired hit man (Keanu Reeves) gets back into action to respond to a mobster’s attacks. Only a handful of touches—involving the Continental, a luxurious Manhattan hotel-cum-hideout—suggest the world-building mythology that has given the series, at its best, its kicks. The world thus built centers on an international organized-crime and contract-killing syndicate called the Ruska Roma, which has its own complex bureaucracy, elaborate rules, history, and even its own anachronistic technology and design. This world-building energizes the films because, unlike comic-book universes, the Wickiverse has chillingly plausible points of contact with ordinary experience and daily life. Its stakes aren’t asserted but felt.

“Ballerina” extends that legend into new territory, but, in so doing, stretches the matter thin. The new film’s Wick-ed connection is suggested from the start: a girl named Eve Macarro (played as a child by Victoria Comte) witnesses the murder of her father (David Castañeda), himself a killer, by a team of assassins and its a grandiloquent and refined leader, who has accused him of breaking the organization’s rules. Then, the similarly suave Winston (Ian MacShane), the manager of the Continental (who has figured prominently in all four of the John Wick extravaganzas) takes the orphaned child (whose mother had previously been killed) under his wing, bringing her into a so-called family. A dozen years later, that home is revealed to be a grandiose Ruska Roma residence where Eve (played as an adult by Ana de Armas) is studying ballet under the strict tutelage of the organization’s Director (Anjelica Huston) and mastering the deadly arts under a series of teachers likewise under the Director’s rule.

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