Ballerina

If you love what the John Wick series has become then you'll love this movie, it's full of action and great fight scenes. However I can't get over how repetitive it is, it's just on and on with the enemies and to me that gets boring pretty quick.

Also, there is almost zero depth to the movie, thematically, emotionally, metaphorically, you name it. Even the main character barely has any story or depth, let alone any other character. It's just one big revenge story and that again ties into the predictability aspect, after about 25 minutes most people should be able to guess what happens the rest of the way.

It's a good theater flick, it's entertaining, but it's not worthy of a high rating due to its tunnel vision plot and lackluster depth.

I was so hyped for this movie! I love Ana de Armas and the John Wick series - Sadly the movie makes one gigantic mistake:

The film wants to tell the story of an absolute beginner in this world of killers, but paints her as the ultimate badass after already 20 minutes!

John Wick was a myth and a legend among people, because he had been in the business for 30+ years or something. He learned tricks and moves to become the ultimate killing machine. He wasn't born as a perfect assassin - he made a name for himself and outlived everyone because he became uniquely good at his job!

In this movie we see this absolute beginner beat up around 8 highly trained fighters in her very first mission without a scratch. Yes she was thrown around a bit, which made it more believable and cool, but this level of competence was something she should have achieved by the end of the movie, not already from the start!

It would have been best if her first mission would have been an absolute failure and she would have almost died - this would have created a bit of fear and higher stakes for the upcoming fights in the story!

But in the film she is in the business for 2 months and is already better than (almost) anyone else who has been trained for 10+ years - that's just ridiculous and ruins all the tension. Dude, it even takes a few months to get decent at a regular office job! It leads us as the audience to instantly believe that no matter what happens, she will be fine.

What I want to see in a beginner story is struggle! I want to see that it's extremely hard for the main character to get through everything so that I can relate to the character and get to root for her! Even fighting one single highly trained person would have been enough for the first fight. (You can do a lot of cool stuff for a fighting sequence between just two people - we have seen this in the John Wick series many times.) Just make her a believable person and a relatable character! (If you compare her fight sequences with those of a different character later on you realise that there is barely any difference in the presented skill level between her and that other character, when fighting other people.)

What makes this whole thing even worse is that she is also acting like this cool tough person who knows it all after a few weeks in the business. It would have been nice to add small things like being confused about the check-in process at one of the hitman hotels because she is not yet familiar with this world or some level of self-doubt and insecurities. This woman has never left her home in years! But we don't feel that for a second! "Oh wow, this place is beautiful!" - or some small human touches like that. A bit of curiosity about the world!

A significant part of what made the John Wick series great was the level of damage the main character took on a constant basis - He got stabbed, trown around and had to be stitched together or walked around all bruised up. You could see that John Wick was going through a lot of pain and suffering. You could feel it! In this movie her hair and makeup look always perfect and if she has a little bit of blood on her face she just wipes it off. Upsi!

This movie is a gigantic missed opportunity without tension or emotional involvement with the main character! Some action sequences are good but they are stitched together without love - we just go from one fight to the next and never get to feel anything. And that is the complete opposite of what Keanu's John Wick was all about - We were rooting for the guy to get his revenge for the little puppy and retire from the industry... Here we don't care about anyone.

This isn't a film, it's a live action video game with a predictable plot and loads of energetically choreographed CGI to substitute for anything vaguely akin to a story. It starts with the young "Eve" (Victoria Comte) who witnesses her father's death at the hands of "The Chancellor" (Gabriel Byrne) before being adopted into the secret society of "John Wick" by "Winston" (Ian McShane) and his drag-like boss (Angelica Huston) where she learns to combine the artistic skills of a ballerina with deadly ninja ones - as she morphs into Ana de Armas (whilst everyone else remains exactly the same). Anyway, none of that really matters as she accidentally discovers the identity of the tribe who ruined her life and despite warnings of dire consequences, sets off on a lethal mission of retribution that takes her to a Czech Republic where everyone speaks perfect English. The thing is, it appears that her gang and the one she is pursuing have a sort of unwritten truce, and given she is about to throw that under the Skoda, Angelica has no choice other than to bring out of retirement the legendary you know who. Will that make anything any different or safer or even less repetitive? It not so much that this is derivative and really quite dull, it's that the dialogue is woeful and the constant frying pan to fire scenarios where people get used and abused are ridiculous. Knives, guns, bottles, pots, pans, kettles - even a pair of ruthlessly applied roller skates and some flamer throwers help our heroine along but it's hilarious that they always appear just when she needs them. She's got the points and gone up a level, She also heals as if she were the sister of "Wolverine" and no amount of training is going to remove a six inch shard of glass from your body without it impeding your ability to scale a wall and wield a pick axe. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, but just like the series upon which this is based, it is unoriginal and after the umpteenth time she has survived against innumerable odds to fight again just had me wondering how long until she's back with "Ballerina II - the Pirouette". All of that said, though, it does look good on a cinema screen and that's where it ought to be seen. It will be even more unimpressive on a television where you can easily hit the fast-forward button.

Get ready for plenty of fighting and gunfight scenes when you take your seat. Nearly three-quarters of the film consists of this type of scene. While the quality of these scenes is slightly below that of the latest John Wick movies, they are still quite enjoyable. It looks like Ana de Armas must have worked very hard to be able to perform in these scenes. Her efforts deserve respect.

The plot of the movie is extremely simple. Perhaps if it had been slightly deeper and more interesting, the movie would have been better.

Another criticism is that our 50-55 kg main character takes extremely heavy blows from men but recovers in just a few seconds. This wasn't believable or realistic. Similarly, our main character is too emotional to be a death angel.

The grenade scenes were over-the-top and even absurd, but the flamethrower scene was the most entertaining.

The duration of John Wick's scenes may exceed your expectations, but that's a good thing, It was nice to see him.

In summary, if you've watched and enjoyed the John Wick movies, you should watch Ballerina. I hope there will be a sequel.

Going to keep this short. While I loved John Wick 1-4, all for different reasons, this one was just one word: boring and repetitive. I am not sure what they were trying to do with this movie. First, there was a weak and very predictable storyline to this movie. Second, the main character just isn't as believable or has the charisma as Keanu / John Wick. There is no 'it' factor. I fell asleep multiple times in this movie whereas in John Wick 4, at almost 3 hours, I was on the edge of my seat refusing to go to the bathroom. Third, there is something about the lighting of many of the fight scenes. They just don't pop. They don't give you the ooh factor. They just seem redundant as if they ran out of ideas. Lastly, this just feels like they are going to run this franchise into the ground. Keanu might actually be portraying himself in real life if he keeps signing onto these movies. He just can't get out if you know what I mean.