What has happened to the Hollywood franchises? The latest segment of Mission Impossible was a crashing bore. The less said, the better about Karate Kid Part…whatever!
Now comes Ballerina …From The World Of John Wick. No less! Let me burst the bubble by telling you there is very little of John Wick in this fifth and most annoying chapter. What we do get is an abundance of Wick-the-f…k episodes.
Many times, I was left gritting my teeth while the female John Wick, the prospective assassin and full-time ballerina Eva Macarro (the gorgeous Ana de Armas), was put through the grind by a screenplay that screams for attention but doesn’t deserve it.
The lost-and-found plot about two sisters separated during childhood by a vicious clansman simply known as the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) is pure hokum, straight out of a Manmohan Desai potboiler in the 1980s; even the tattoos to identify missing persons seem to be borrowed from Desai’s absurdist cinema.
If he was alive, Manmohan Desai would have surely sued. We can only wonder at the temerity of the team behind this atrociously written, stiffly performed, blood-soaked, bullish ballet of bullets, where the only crew member who seems to take his job seriously is the cameraman Romain Lacourbas. He shoots every frame as though it is the last. The composition of the shots is so rich that they crave an emotional manifestation.
All we get is one stagey action sequence after another. Tragically, Ms Armas, who is among the more promising young stars of America, is not much of a fighter. Her stunt sequences seem somewhat bedazzled by their own expertise. The lady and her choreographer are so bonded that their combined efforts seem like a mutual admiration society that excludes the audience.
The rest of the cast is superfluous and, worse, a parody of the characters’ earlier selves in the John Wick series. Angelica Houston, a fine actress once upon a time, evokes laughter each time she comes on screen, even though I don’t think she was meant to be funny. She seems so full of herself.
Midway through this melange of mayhem, Manmohan (Desai) and melodrama, Norman Reedus appears as an assassin eager to protect his little daughter. Reedus’s role and the spectrum of his expression range from the strange to the deranged. When Eva, the saviour, steps in to help, it feels like an intrusion.
Nothing seems to fit, least of all Ana de Armas’ stunts, which are all over the place.
Why is everyone so overwrought in Ballerina? Could it be that they know they have signed up for a dud? No one more than Keanu Reeves, whose John Wick makes an appearance at the climax to help the heroine crack a cult society that kidnaps young girls and trains them to be assassins.
So the bottomline: even the Shero needs a Hero to bail her out finally.
