BEFORE: OK, let's go, let's get this big festival train rolling, the sooner the ride starts the sooner it will be over and I can once again catch up on some sleeps. Today I'll be at the Tribeca Festival venue from 2:30 to whenever, maybe I'll be home tonight in time to post something about "Ballerina" and MAYBE watch another film for tomorrow, but I think by Monday I'll be looking to cash in one or both of my skip days and just focus on my job, then pick up movies again on Tuesday or Wednesday. It sure would make things easier. Let me check the actor birthdays for the next couple of films and see if I can justify that.
Catalina Sandino Moreno carries over from "The Rip". Honestly, I don't even know what exactly to call this film - IMDB just lists it as "Ballerina" but my cable company uses the full title "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina", so, umm, which is it? Wiki also prefers the shorter title, saying that the "From The World of" part was just used for marketing purposes. Yes, as the NAME OF THE FILM. Quite often I think you'll find that the name of the film is very important to the marketing of the film. People need to know what to call the film when they buy a ticket at the box office. I'm going with the longer name because I think I filed the DVD alphabetically under "F", not "B".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "John Wick: Chapter 4" (Movie #4,613)
THE PLOT: An assassin trained in the traditions of the Ruska Roma organization sets out to see revenge after her father's death.
AFTER: Also, it's more hilarious to point out the studio's terrible marketing ideas. Everybody's just throwing darts at a dartboard at the end of the day and really, nobody at any studio has any idea what they're doing. Using "John Wick" in the title will put asses in the seats - but we don't want to call this "John Wick 5" because movie fans hate numbered sequels, and also John Wick is only in the film for about 10 minutes, max, and we don't want "John Wick" fans to get pissed off. Oh, we want them to come to the theaters, but we don't want them to expect a full "John Wick" movie because this is NOT that. So now it's a damned confusing mess, like if you're going to use the "John Wick" brand to sell tickets, then use it and own that. Don't just dance all around it, am I right? Like it's "Solo: A Star Wars Story" because it's "Star Wars" that puts butts in seats. You know somebody just wanted to call it "Solo" and they got voted down, right?
This film is set between "John Wick: Chapter 3" and "Chapter 4", that should be obvious because the Continental is still in business, and it was closed down in Chapter 4. There's no real reason this couldn't have been a numbered John Wick movie, if they had just put him in more scenes or made him a bigger part of Eve Macarro's life, it all would have been fine. But she takes the lead here and acts like the one-woman army herself, so I guess maybe having John Wick do some of the grunt work or the killing could have taken away from her accomplishments. This is a bit like "Wicked" in that the main character doesn't even really know her own back story or her true parentage - the man she called her father may have been an assassin himself, only we don't see it, and we only know that he kidnapped her from the cult, which led to the death of her mother. The cult and the Chancellor raid their castle-like home, and her father dies in the process, but he got Eve to safety so she wouldn't be raised by the cultists.
Instead she's found by Winston Scott, the manager of the New York Continental and he brings her to the Ruska Roma, a different assassins' society where she can major in assassin and also have a minor in ballet, or maybe it's the other way around. She trains for 12 years, and the final test is to kill another member who's jaded, her heart just isn't in it any more - ugh, what are you gonna do with these Gen Alpha kids, I ask you? - but this cements her reputation, completes her training and she earns the title of "Kikimora", whatever that means. At some point along the way she bumps into John Wick himself, and apparently he's got a reputation, because she expresses that she wants to be like him. Wick, meanwhile, says that he's looking for a way out of the lifestyle - yeah, that tracks.
But Eve wants to use her new assassin skills to track down the cult that killed her father - Winston doesn't want to tell her at first who's responsible, because they don't play by the same rules as the other assassins. Killing isn't just business for them, it's also sport, and who doesn't love sports? Also, once she learns about them she can't unlearn them, but still, he tells her one former cultist, Daniel Pine, is staying at the hotel, having just recently rescued his own daughter from them - wait, that feels a bit familiar... When Eve goes to visit him, cult member Lena suddenly increases the bounty on him, causing several assassins to attack, hoping to earn the large payday.
Pine gets shot, and his daughter Ella gets re-taken by the cult. Eve is incapacitated and the two assassins who attacked a guest of the Continental (it's against the rules) are executed. Well, that sure tidied up a few loose ends - after a few more cult members attack the Continental's arms dealer, he shares the location of their base in Austria with Eve so she can try to set things right, get Ella back for Pine and also track down whoever killed her own father. This means that basically the people she wants to kill are protected by a whole TOWN of ex-assassins, who moved there so they could, I don't know, practice the assassin lifestyle, or send their kids to assassin school, or maybe there were low property taxes, who can say?
To prevent a war between the cult and the Ruska Roma, the Director sends John Wick into the fray, I'm sure with his very unpopular ideas about morality and inability to follow rules, he's only going to make things much more confusing. Yep. In the battle between Wick and Eve, Wick comes out on top and he urges her to abandon her pursuit of vengeance - he should know, it only ends after a lot of people die and you never really get your dead dog back, so umm, what's the point of it all? But he gives her until midnight to kill the Chancellor, and he even helps out by being a long-range sniper. Yeah, it's a bit weird how he was sent there to kill Eve, but then he helps her take down her target. Well, it's not a linear path sometimes, and even an assassin has to just follow his gut sometimes, if he takes a job and it doesn't feel right, he's allowed to switch things up, right? Hey, his actions ended up producing a result, even if it's not the result he was hired to achieve, it's still a result.
There's an ending but no real resolution here - due to the death of the Chancellor, Eve ends up with a $5 million bounty on her head, and, well, good luck collecting that, everyone. What's really weird here is that the John Wick Franchise already had a character in "Parabellum" who was in the Ruska Roma, and who was a ballerina AND an assassin, only Eve is not that character, that character was named Rooney, and was played by Unity Phelan. So why make a whole new movie about a new character very similar to one from the previous movie, instead of just revealing Rooney's back-story? I have no idea. For that matter, why release the film just one week before "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning", because everyone's going to go see THAT movie instead of "Ballerina" in its second week of release.
Directed by Len Wiseman (director of "Total Recall" (2012) and "Live Free or Die Hard")
Also starring Ana de Armas (last seen in "Blonde"), Keanu Reeves (last seen in "Much Ado About Nothing"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Death Race"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "Daddy Day Care"), Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity"), Ava Joyce McCarthy, Juliet Doherty, Norman Reedus (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Lance Reddick (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Sharon Duncan-Brewster (last seen in "Imagine Me & You"), David Castaneda (last seen in "The Guilty"), Victoria Comte, Robert Maaser (last seen in "The Machine"), Sooyoung Choi, Jung Doo-hong, Anne Parillaud (last seen in "The Man in the Iron Mask"), Marc Cram (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Rila Fukushima (last seen in "Annette"), Abraham Popoola (last seen in "Atlas"), Magdalena Sittova, Waris Ahluwalla (last seen in "Okja"), Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in "Lou"), Anna Schmidtmajerova, Emilie Paclova, Jackson Spidell (last seen in "Blue Beetle"), James Beaumont, Tracie Bennett, Stephanie Brush (last seen in "Knock Knock, It's Tig Notaro"), Mirko Marchesi, Zac Ladkin, Togo Igawa (last seen in "Speed Racer")
RATING: 5 out of 10 flamethrowers (sure, they look cool, but how effective are they? You can't kill five assassins with one unless you also burn down the entire town...)
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