Ana de Armas earns the franchise and Len Wiseman’s film spends its first hour explaining why. Once the talking stops and the flamethrowers come out, it is the fun it should have been all along; getting there is a slog.
Eve (Ana de Armas) is a child when her father is killed, and Winston (Ian McShane) delivers her to the Ruska Roma, where the Director (Anjelica Huston) runs a ballet school that also turns out assassins. Years later, trained and working, she goes after the people who did it. That is the whole plot of Ballerina, and it is the right plot for this series, which has always run on one grievance and a great deal of movement. Len Wiseman’s spin-off takes an hour to get moving. When it does, it is close to the film we wanted.
The first act is the problem. Shay Hatten’s script explains the Ruska Roma, then the Continental, then the cult and its rules, and then explains them again in case a newcomer has wandered in. The editors, Jason Ballantine and Nicholas Lundgren, hurry the training years past in montage and cut the early fights close and short, arms and faces rather than bodies in a room, so that we could not see what the stunt team had built. Keanu Reeves arrives, says a few slow words, and the film stops to look at him as though a head of state had walked in. It does this more than once. We were bored for forty minutes, and then cross about it, because the film we had come for was plainly in the building.
De Armas is the reason to stay. She is smaller than every man she fights and the choreography is built around that: she goes low, uses whatever is within reach, gets thrown through furniture and gets up. Between blows she has a stillness that reads as thought rather than pose, and she does not ask to be liked. The film keeps telling us she is a dancer and gives her almost no dancing to do. What she has instead is a way of crossing a room as if she had already decided where everyone in it would fall, and it is enough.
The second half is a different film. Eve reaches a snow-covered mountain village where every shopkeeper and grandmother is armed, and the set pieces come one after another with proper room to breathe. The one everyone will talk about is a duel fought with flamethrowers in a snowy street, the snow steaming where the fire lands. We laughed out loud at the cheek of it and then found we were gripping the armrest. Romain Lacourbas lights the village blue-black and lets the fire do the rest; one wide shot of Eve small against a wall of flame is the image we would keep. For twenty minutes we forgot the first hour entirely.
The rest of the craft is solid without being memorable. Philip Ivey’s Ruska Roma theatre is all gilt, dark wood and rehearsal-room mirrors, and his village looks like a brochure until the shutters open. Tina Kalivas puts the cult in shearling and heavy wool and Eve in black, and gives Huston collars severe enough to be a warning. Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard supply the low electronic pulse the series has always had, and it does its job without once surprising us. Gabriel Byrne’s Chancellor is soft-voiced and barely there; this series has never troubled itself much with villains, but this one seems to want only a quiet life. Norman Reedus has a short, good turn as a man who has done the arithmetic on his own survival, and Lance Reddick’s Charon has a scene at the Continental desk that we were glad of.
Set against Chad Stahelski’s John Wick (2014), which held its shots wide and long so every hit could be counted, this looks cramped in its first half and only catches up in its second. Wiseman made Underworld (2003), and the blue-black night suits him; the patience with a wide shot does not come as naturally. The idea underneath, that dance and killing are the same discipline, is said several times and shown never. Stahelski is credited as a producer, and you can feel him in the last hour.
It runs 125 minutes and carries a 15. The second hour deserves company and the biggest screen you can find. The first deserves a cup of tea made slowly, with the kitchen door open so you can hear when the flamethrowers start.
