Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
발레리나 **/**** starring Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Ji-hoon, Park Yu-rim, Shin Se-hwi written and directed by Lee Chung-hyun
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina */**** starring Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Keanu Reeves written by Shay Hatten directed by Len Wiseman
by Walter Chaw At the end of Lee Chung-hyun’s 2023 film Ballerina, its hero, a badass master of weaponry on a mission of vengeance, uses a hilariously overpowered flamethrower to incinerate a serial rapist/killer and his Lamborghini on a neon-lit beach in South Korea. At the end of Len Wiseman’s Ballerina (2025), a badass master of weaponry on a mission of vengeance uses a hilariously overpowered flamethrower to incinerate a dozen or so Shemps in a neon-lit CGI mock-up of an alpine snow globe. The hero of Lee’s Ballerina, Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo), is a former bodyguard upset because her (probably) lover–Choi Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), a ballerina–has killed herself over the abuse suffered at the hands of the aforementioned charcoal briquette. Wiseman’s hero, Eve (Ana de Armas), is upset because as a child she witnessed the assassination of her father (Caleb Spillyards) at the hands of baddies collectively called the “Schmorga-Borga” or some other Swedish Chef nonsense, led by the mysterious Chancellor (uncanny-valley youthened Gabriel Byrne). Eve has spent her life [deep breath] training to be a ballerina-slash-assassin in the house of “Um Chop Chop Um Pluck Pluck”–led by the Director (Anjelica Huston), who manages to sneak the word “family” into every single line of her dialogue like a refugee from another exhausted and ludicrous franchise–just to avenge her dear, departed da. Rest assured, it’s as trite and terrible as it sounds. But thanks to escapism being in short supply these days, not to mention the illusion of sunk-cost fallacy, you’re probably going to see it anyway.
At this point, we have spent around 10 hours with Keanu Reeves’s John Wick without learning any bullshit about a troubled childhood that turned him into a killing machine. I love how we meet him in John Wick: past mid-life and newly widowed when some eurotrash punks make the mistake of stealing his car and murdering his puppy. This is the exact amount of motive and information necessary for the Wick character, and as each of the three sequels dutifully provided increasingly byzantine details of the assassin subculture to which he belongs, I lost a commensurate amount of interest in trying to keep up with it all. Look, I’m sorry, but who could possibly give a shit about Houses and Lords and special hotels and “INCOMMUNICADO” pidgin phrases meant to sound grand and laden with tradition yet mostly succeeding at sounding like an audible called mid-quest during a game of Calvinball? The pleasure of these texts for me has always been in how they represent the United States finally catching up to the stuff John Woo was doing at the end of the 1980s–yes, 35 years ago–in Hong Kong, even as their invention notably levelled off by John Wick: Chapter 4 with its listless “borrowing” from Zatoichi and The Warriors. I was there for the Woo-cum-Kim Jee-woon set-pieces, is what I’m saying, and the bracing respect the franchise earned (and showed) by not doing the typical revenge plot with the standard revenge hero.
All that is out the window in Ballerina, the franchise’s second spin-off (after the streaming series “The Continental”), which, between the hasty “From the World of John Wick” tag added to its title and the absence of the “Tiny Dancer” arrangement heard in (and apparently commissioned expressly for) its trailer, is an exercise in disrespecting the audience. The step down from Chad Stahelski to Wiseman, for starters, is precipitous, as is a script by Rebel Moon scribe Shay Hatten that feels at least four or five drafts away from speakable, much less workable shape. Consider this exchange:
LITTLE GIRL: Who are you?
EVE: Oh, shit.
LITTLE GIRL: You’re not supposed to say that word.
EVE: Right, sorry. What’s your name?
LITTLE GIRL: Ella.
EVE: I’m Eve.
LITTLE GIRL: You’re not here to hurt my daddy, are you?
Her scumbag daddy (a typecast Norman Reedus) has decided, apparently, to use his daughter as a distraction for the assassins he knows are coming for him–and that’s ridiculous, though not as ridiculous as a film packed with dialogue like this tiny-thespians workshop improv. The bottom of the barrel is deep here, alas. “The world took your father from you, and that pain is what drives you,” Eve hears a few times, along with my favourite: “Fight like a girl!” That’s what Eve’s fighting teacher tells her in a montage straight out of the opening credits of the “Fame” TV series. Fighting like a girl, incidentally, looks an awful lot like kicking, shooting, or otherwise savaging male opponents in the crotch. I can’t work out if this is the bracing rallying cry it’s meant to be or not, but if you insist on equating “fighting like a girl” with an inferior form of fighting, okay, you go, girl! Lee Chung-hyun’s Ballerina is comparatively well-written, not because it’s Shaw, but because it doesn’t go on and on about extraneous lore. I have come to think of films like the U.S. Ballerina as porn: you endure excruciating exposition to reach the overchoreographed rolling around. The fight scenes in both pictures are pretty similar. The earlier film is more teeth-rattlingly brutal, but more people are killed in the current one. I want to take issue with how a good portion of the dead people in the American Ballerina are also Asian, but I’m just going to deal with it quietly.
The South Korean Ballerina deals with genuinely ugly topics like brutal rape, snuff films, and “weird” porn, while the American Ballerina is a family-friendly collection of knives, bullets, crossbow bolts, and axes to the eyes and face with, again, considerably more howling immolations. The South Korean one has the better villains and the better lead performance by a significant margin. It’s got better pacing and a more legible plot, too–no “when I was a little girl” bullshit. Really, though, everything that’s wrong with the American Ballerina is what’s wrong with big-budget filmmaking in the United States right now: this misguided mandate to plug everything in to a profitable intellectual property, whatever the cost. IP is a tumor on otherwise healthy cells. Lee’s Ballerina is part five of nothing. What a relief. It’s no masterpiece, but notably, it isn’t terminally flaccid and taking on water with every awkwardly injected, dork-pleasing Easter egg. But I get it. Imagine thinking someone with the obvious charm and charisma–the clear star power–of an Ana de Armas deserves a standalone project. Absurd, right?
