I’ll never forget the first time I saw the original John Wick. I had no interest in it at first. Keanu Reeves had struck me as a somewhat wooden actor before I saw it, and another Keanu action movie? Pass. Everything I know about the man himself makes him sound like a great guy, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to see his movies. Something like The Matrix worked because he mostly had to silently react. But I saw John Wick was leaving HBO Max the next day and decided to give it a shot, and boy, was I glad I did! Keanu’s general acting state actually worked for the movie, and it was cool as hell to boot! The second one came out not long after I saw the first, and that one I saw in a packed house full of fans as I have every other sequel.
So, really, given this weird and bizarre underworld in those movies, doing another movie set in that universe could work out very well, leading to the charming Ana de Armas in this year’s spinoff Ballerina.
De Armas stars as Eve Macarro. As a girl, she watched her father die at the hands of a criminal cult led by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), but her dad gave as good as he got, getting her to safety. She’s soon picked up by Winston (Ian McShane) and taken to see the Director (Angelica Huston) of the Ruska Roma, one of the underworld organizations that brought Keanu’s John Wick into the world, so to speak. Eve is trained in both dancing and killing, taught to use her smaller size and overall wiliness to her advantage as one of Ruska Roma’s bodyguard/assassins. Sometimes she goes out to kill. Sometimes she goes out to save. The choice may always be hers.
However, on one such routine job, she is attacked by some men with X-shaped scars on their wrists, the same scars the men who killed her father had. The Director refuses to talk about who they are, but Eve has some markers she can call in. These people killed her father. Eve wants answers. Unfortunately, no one else within the underworld wants anything to do with the Chancellor’s Cult, a group that supposedly also kills for sport as much as part of a job like every other organization in the underworld. There may be good reason for that. These people are dangerous, but so is Eve. And you just know John Wick is going to show up at some point.
First off, the movie is directed by Len Wiseman. Wiseman is known mostly for the Underworld movies and a few other action movies, and while screenwriter Shay Hatten wrote the last two John Wick movies, I would say Chad Stahelski’s unique style behind the camera might have made this a better movie. There are some really creative action scenes here, and the movie tries to replicate the look and feel of a John Wick movie but can’t quite pull it off. Factor in as well a plot that is fairly complicated by John Wick standards, and I wasn’t entirely sure what Eve’s motivations were. She has a couple of different motives for what she’s doing, but the central one? I’m not sure. There are also some clumsy moments that seem to exist solely for plot purposes, like an odd line that young Eve delivers in the opening flashback that seems to only fit into the script for a later payoff, or a reveal in the closing minutes that seems to have no reason to have happened.
That said, I had a lot of fun with this movie. De Armas’s guttural grunts as she fights, the action scenes that are clever, cool, or both, these make the movie. Eve has a distinct way to fight. John Wick may go for quick head shots and the like, but she seems to favor breaking arms and smashing things over her opponents’ heads. There are enough moments to remind the audience that this is set in the John Wick universe, and not just when John himself shows up onscreen. They may not be quite as good, but they’re often fun. The movie did have a few moments that briefly knocked me out of the movie, and these movies are generally set in a simple universe. John Wick’s motivation is, in order, avenge the death of his dog, get his car back, and then survive long enough to find a way out of the criminal underworld that just wants him dead. Eve’s is one of multiple things, and while she says it is one distinct thing, it still felt to me like it could also be other things. It’s a fun movie, but it’s not quite on the same level as any John Wick. It just had too many moments that made me go “Hey, wait a minute!” to give it a better grade than the one I did.
Grade: C+
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