I Hate These Fucking Movies
A few words about 'Ballerina'
I tend to like most movies I watch. I like movies, is the thing. I like watching them. It takes a real dull sort of time, or worse, for me to not “like” a movie. My Letterboxd profile bears this out, I believe. I go into movies quite open. Even movies I expect to be on the, shall we say, “bad” end of the quality scale, I approach with the hope that at the very least they’ll deliver a good time, and if I have a good time, I’m happy. I go to a lot of rep screenings of old films, which are usually curated for a reason, and those reasons often lead to appreciation regardless of objective measures. Of course, there are plenty I don’t much care for either, and some of them are fun to hate on, but in truth, I rarely hate a movie. Why should I? It’s just a movie.
I hate the John Wick movies. Back up. Let’s be precise: I hate the John Wick extended universe. In fact, I quite loved the first John Wick, a modestly budgeted programmer starring a middle-aged Keanu Reeves taking revenge on the people who killed his puppy, gifted to him posthumously by his late wife. It was directed by a couple of old hat stunt guys who finally got the opportunity to put everything they’d learned into a kickass orchestration of fistfights and balletic gunplay. The movie worked on a very base level, where the cruelty suffered by John Wick at the beginning of the film becomes a handshake deal with the audience, allowing the vengeful mayhem in the rest of the film a moral pass. The kind of letting off steam fiction is so perfect for, mediating the perhaps more dangerous human urges within the scope of art. In this case, well-directed, silly, violent art.
What lifted John Wick above other films of its kind wasn’t just the quality of the action filmmaking, or even its cool look and Reeves’ great, weathered star performance. It was the details along the margins. What starts as a fairly typical “secret assassin who tried to get out” actioner begins introducing odd elements, like the Continental, a hotel for assassins, phone operators sending out open kill contracts, special gold coins that can get you a host of assault weapons or a drink at the bar. These weren’t the focus of the film at all, which is why they worked. They gave it a sense of breadth, that the vengeance plot existed within a wider, weirder tapestry.
Then the sequels happened.
I don’t remember much from John Wick: Chapter 2 other than my feeling of depressed boredom while watching it. The series had now levelled up, with a shinier visual style (see: a lot of colour LED lighting) and even more outrageously choreographed action. All of it technically impressive, but weightless. Where the first film had revenge driving the action, the second film went all in on mythology. “World-building.” Put a gun to my head, thanks.
Fleshing out the world of John Wick was, I suppose, inevitable the moment a sequel was announced, but I hoped the fleshing out would remain a background endeavour. There must have been something, certainly, to drive the story along that wasn’t just filling out newer and more idiotic ways to use gold coins. Alas, there really wasn’t. It was action and world-building. Which might have been acceptable, except that action without purpose loses charm, especially when there’s so much CG blood involved. The story, meanwhile… Well, I don’t remember it, but I gather it was functionally the same as all the sequels: since John Wick took his revenge, he’s now gotten himself on the bad side of various assassin clans, and is just trying to get out again. Perhaps a fine plot on its own, but in the context of the first film, it lacks charge. If not satiating some lust for revenge, what are we watching for?
The first sequel, and the ones that followed, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of that agreement with the audience. Now, here I’ll admit that the ballooning success of the Reeves-led films, culminating in truly huge box office totals for John Wick: Chapter 4, indicate that a lot of people do not see things the way I do. What I see is a failure to actually reckon with the violence depicted in a context where somehow the moral and physical toll of all that violence is Wick’s motivator for getting free of his assassin background. I’m sorry, but it’s really hard to watch scenes in these films fetishizing the hell out of terrifying weapons and coolly showing its hero double-tapping bad guys in public spaces, all while being told over and over that “none of this is okay.” If you want me to enjoy the violence, let me enjoy it, don’t make me think about it. At a certain point it all starts feeling deeply perverse.
Which brings us to Ballerina, the first feature film spin-off in the franchise (there was also a Continental TV series that nobody watched and by all accounts was terrible), starring Ana de Armas as a young woman raised as an assassin. It’s set between the third and fourth John Wick films, and Reeves appears in something like an extended cameo, tying the spin-off even more directly to its franchise. Going into the movie, I was wary. I’d already grown tired of the John Wick films, going back for each one mostly because fond memories of the first gave me a false hope they’d hit the mark once more. Word of extensive reshoots would normally have me worried, but in this case it was to correct problems with a film credited to director Len Wiseman, one of the worst around. Plus, there’s Ana de Armas, a very good actress who, crucially, stole the show in No Time to Die with just one incredibly charming and incredibly choreographer and incredibly sexy sequence.
In Ballerina, de Armas exists in the mould of John Wick himself, stoic and riddled with trauma, the effervescence that’s made her such a knockout in the James Bond film and Knives Out completely absent. A dire sign of the film’s drudgery overall. Its opening act, despite the action sequences littered throughout, is a chore-and-a-half to sit through. All kinds of mumbo jumbo about families and tribes and the brainwashing of children into becoming assassins. None of it works, and I mostly felt terrible for Angelica Houston that she’s been dragged into all this for the money. Things do pick up in the second half, when de Armas ventures off to a town in the mountains populated entirely by an assassin cult. It’s a bit of a cartoon idea, and that’s matched by the action in the film, which takes its mantra from the line in the film, “Fight like a girl,” which in this case means using cunning, improvisation, and even dirty tricks when strength will not suffice. The result is a lot more haphazard action than is typical of the series, with a lot of random objects used as weapons, especially hammers of all sorts. Late in the film, there’s a flamethrower battle. Even I can’t deny, that’s cool.
But cool is not enough, not in a movie like this. Though Ballerina is all about revenge, like the original John Wick, it tries to have things both ways, on the one hand indulging revenge fantasies, while constantly reminding you that all of this is morally reprehensible. I am sorry, but I didn’t buy a ticket for a Michael Haneke movie. I don’t need these movies to be a treatise on the ways killing and wanton violence destroy the soul, but making this movie fundamentally about that idea, all while displaying pure glee at the most disgustingly matter-of-fact murdering you’re likely to get with an R-rating, and I start to feel like I’m being had. And that’s where the resentment builds.
I remember a sequence, I believe in the third film, where Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry are fighting off guys with the help of Wick’s dog. It’s one of the worst, ugliest, most tedious, most disgusting scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. Minutes on end of the same thing, over and over. A dog attacks a guy and then Wick shoots him in the head. And again. And again. Over and over to the point that however impressed I might have been at the dog training involved, the end result is simply sickening.
Lest you think I’m against amoral movies, I have no problem with exploitation movies, or sick art house movies. Films that use their perversity with clear intention, either to shock, or intellectually stimulate, or both. There’s merit in even a film as deplorable as Cannibal Holocaust. The Wick films sit closer to the direct-to-video action movie in spirit, and those can be enjoyably reprehensible, too. Check out Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning for some delightfully, upsettingly deranged action violence. But even those cheapo excuses for stunt performers to show off (and I’d consider the first John Wick a part of this) are wise enough to understand their lack of import. The violence is there because there’s something weirdly cathartic about watching people do terrible things to each other with no material consequence. They don’t invite introspection. They’re hardly trying to tell real stories outside of revenge and other simplistic plot mechanics. The John Wick sequels, though, including Ballerina, aspire to more, and in that aspiration they expose how twisted that kind of violence is. Maybe it’s a distinction without a difference, but sometimes with art, you know it when you feel it, and these movies make me feel simultaneously bored and disgusted.
After the first film, all these films feel that way to me. Sickening. At this point, I’m hesitant to rewatch the original John Wick for fear of discovering I hate that one, too. And I do hate these fucking movies. I hate them. They tick every box that’s wrong with movies today, as far as I’m concerned. It’s Marvel filmmaking dressed up in some good choreography and a lot of purple light strips, and somehow that’s convinced a lot of otherwise discerning moviegoers that this franchise is one of the good ones. They take a fun original film and add nothing but bloat, all while siphoning away any moral distance from the action to the point that I want to take a shower after watching one. That is, if I’m not already half asleep, having had to sit through endless scenes of good actors delivering the worst dialogue imaginable in the most portentous fashion for nothing other than “world-building” and a more fancy excuse to show human beings massacred. There’s no fun in it anymore. This isn’t Final Destination. At least I can say, finally, I’ve learned my lesson.