De Armas is fun as a feisty assassin trained in ballet and martial arts, combining delicacy and violence in her quest for vengeance, with a cameo from Keanu. She doesn’t wear a tutu to fill goons with lead though
That title could cause confusion. The film might accidentally tap into the Frozen customer-base, and millions of wide-eyed little girls in sparkly tutus and tiaras will show up at cinemas with their mums and dads to watch Keanu Reeves let a heavy-set gangster have it in the chops with a round from his specially customised Glock. Well, the confusion is deliberate. Here, the delicacy of ballet and the violence of martial arts are conflated. In this new spin-off feature from Keanu’s John Wick action franchise – an auxiliary episode on the timeline, between Wick episodes Three and Four, when JW was lying low, recovering from injuries – a mysterious new action-slash-classical-dance heroine called Eve now grands-jetés her way into the franchise, played by the always stylish Ana de Armas. JW veteran Shay Hatten writes the screenplay and Len Wiseman directs.
The central idea returns me an old maxim of mine: people who call action scenes in films “balletic” have never seen a ballet, or indeed a fight, in their lives. Yet I was sort of hoping that de Armas’s ballerina Eve Macarro would put the smackdown on a couple of dozen goons while up on pointe. Sadly no. But I do have to admit that de Armas carries off the essential silliness of Ballerina and, after her performance as Paloma in No Time to Die opposite Daniel Craig’s 007, she proves again she can do action, in both couture and daytime wear; she can also carry out the time-honoured lightning-fast choreography of removing a clip from an automatic weapon, inspecting its contents, smacking it back into position with the heel of her palm and then filling someone full of lead.
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