Attention all action film fans! Run, don’t walk, to the nearest movie theater to see From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Then set aside some time a day or two later to go see it again. This is one for the ages.
Ana de Armas, who’s been a star waiting for the right vehicle ever since Knives Out brought her to widespread attention in 2019, has now got a film franchise worthy of her. The fascination of Ballerina is established early on — how can a small, slight, delicate-looking young woman such as de Armas’s character, Eve Macarro, trained in ballet, become an unbeatable killing machine à la John Wick, so she can avenge her murdered parents?
Though it should be noted that ballet is an insanely athletic discipline that inures practitioners to pain. Ballerina demonstrates this in a scene of bleeding toes in red-soaked toe shoes that ends with the implacable Director (Anjelica Huston) telling Eve, “Go tend to your wounds before you get sepsis and we have to cut off your feet.”
So Eve’s got a high tolerance for pain going for her. But she keeps losing in hand-to-hand combat exercises against men. Finally, the Director, who runs a ballet academy that also trains assassins for the deadly Ruska Roma crime family, tells her she’ll never be bigger or stronger than her opponents. So how to survive and win?
“Fight like a girl.”
Here, that line means: figure out how to use your own apparent weaknesses to your advantage, so that size and strength no longer determine the winner. Flexibility, adaptability, the element of surprise, the willingness to “cheat” — all of this soon has Eve winning every battle. And there’s an unspoken element that’s the best of all — the emotionality that’s supposed to be a weakness of women is turned into a vicious fury. Once Eve wins her first bout, and the defeated man is lying on the ground, she kicks him sadistically in the groin, a completely gratuitous yet thrilling expulsion of…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
