Ana de Armas in Ballerina
BALLERINA
Although the movie isn't very funny until it begins hitting us with its really creative gory deaths, there was a moment not long into director Len Wiseman's Ballerina – a continuation being helpfully marketed as From the World of John Wick: Ballerina – that made me and others among our Thursday-afternoon crowd laugh out loud.
In this latest über-violent action thriller that I guess we're supposed to call a “midquel,” its events concurrent with those of 2019's John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, our vengeful heroine Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) is training in dance and combat with the Ruska Roma, that New York-based haven for pirouetting wannabe assassins. Some 20 minutes into the film, quite by accident, Eve runs into Keanu Reeves' fabled Baba Yaga, who suggests to the young woman that she resist her homicidal impulses before it's too late. Eve asks John why he hasn't taken his own advice, and it was then that Reeves provided Ballerina's first audible laugh with Wick's reply: “I'm working on it.”
There's an awful lot of comedy baked into those four words. For those in the know, the line itself is funny, because as evidenced by Parabellum and 2023's Chapter 4, Wick clearly wasn't working on it terribly hard. The reading of the line is funny, because it comes after one of Reeves' signature pauses in which his expression simultaneously suggests deep thought, Zen-like peace, and an actor who has momentarily forgotten his lines, or perhaps the tenets of human speech. (I say this with utter fandom and love; Reeves pulls off the same effect, just as endearingly, with Wick's later recitation of “Your choice.”) But “I'm working on it” is also inside-baseball funny, because Chapter 4 viewers know that the series' third sequel was the perfect opportunity for Keanu to walk away, head held high, from this franchise forever … and look where he finds himself now. The 60-year-old star may indeed be working on it, yet its clear that the Lionsgate distributors aren't gonna let John Wick go – aren't gonna let Reeves go – without a fight.
Thankfully, the fighting in Ballerina is mostly excellent, and it desperately needs to be, because the rest of Wiseman's movie is largely a wash. While Shay Hatten's script gives us an origin story for a debuting figure now tied to “the world of John Wick,” it's about the least inventive one imaginable, tying Eve to two of this genre's more tiresome conceits: (1) the killer who, having witnessed a parent's murder as a youth, has spent every day since planning revenge, and (2) the killer who, obligated to save a child in peril, rediscovers her formerly absent humanity. Neither avenue gives the gifted, empathetic de Armas much to do beyond looking sullen, though the long-take action choreography, with cinematographer Romain Lacourbas' camera routinely capturing whole bodies in motion, does imply that the star ably performed many of her own stunts. (Reportedly, de Armas and Tom Cruise have been spending a lot of time together lately, and it's nice knowing they have something to talk about beyond their shared height.)
Still, Eve's plot-mandated dourness is a drain on the film, and Wiseman and Hatten give us nothing to care about, or even look forward to, in terms of the standalone narrative. An early tease that Eve may have a long-lost sister merely begs the question “When will she show up?” (When she inevitably did, it was a bummer realizing that such a talented, under-employed actor was stuck with such an empty role.) And my spirits sank a bit when we learned that Eve's ultimate nemesis, The Man Who Killed Her Father, was being played by Gabriel Byrne. He isn't necessarily unwelcome, but Byrne's malevolent paterfamilias is the ne plus ultra of debased, soft-spoken, European baddies, and nothing the familiar Irish performer says while enacting clichéd monstrosities carries even a whiff of surprise. Gabriel Byrne is who you get when Stellan Skarsgård turns the job down because he's played the part too many times before.
At least we're given some enjoyable, if limited, callbacks to the John Wick canon. Rascally Ian McShane is back as Wick's pal and Continental Hotel owner Winston Scott, and the Continental is back, too, along with a cameo for the late, much-missed Lance Reddick as the venue's trusted concierge. (I mistakenly thought Chapter 4 would mark the last time we saw Reddick as Charon. I was thrilled to be wrong.) There's enough kick left in the series' specific, old-school niceties – the phone operators out of a 1950s cop show; the cash awards for prized bounties updated on a chalkboard – to make even their brief returns kind of sweet. And any excuse to see Anjelica Huston as the floridly dressed dowager of Ruska Roma is a pretty great one. Her unnamed Director may look too embalmed to even lift her eyelids, but Huston's magnificent imperiousness suggests it's a conscious choice. This woman is too powerful, too formidable, to exert energy lifting anything.
Much as I'd like to believe that $25-million-worth of domestic ticket-buyers turned out for Anjelica Huston, though, it's the action they're/I'm here for, and after a couple of disappointingly staged skirmishes at the start, Wiseman's franchise continuation delivers sensationally on that front. (It's been reported that producer Chad Stahelski, who directed the first four Wicks, took charge on additional re-shoots, and while both he and Wiseman refute the claim that Stahelski did any hands-on directing here, it's easy to guess the sequences the man might've been primarily responsible for.) Amusingly, the first memorable battle isn't a battle at all – it's the aftermath of one, with Eve retracing her steps, and all the goons she killed, as we increasingly discover the depths of her murderous skills and the many, many, many small knives she arms herself with. But a spectacular, legitimately witnessed bloody brawl lands not long afterward in the middle of a scene you don't expect it to: the customary let's-meet-the-weaponry detour out of a Bond flick that gets interrupted well before Eve makes a purchase. Meanwhile, the movie's last hour is essentially one long, intensely clever action sequence, because it turns out there's something worse than the Continental's all-assassins registry, and that's an all-assassins town.
I can't remember if this theoretically charming Austrian locale, with its snow-covered chalets and happy denizens roaming about in wool sweaters, is ever given a name. But JohnWickLand would be an adequate moniker, because the brutal lunatics are everywhere, and so are conceivable devices for execution: guns, knives, grenades, ice skates. Oh yes, and flamethrowers. Amazing flamethrowers. Before we get a look at one ourselves, we see Eve's expression as she gazes down at one, and all she can mutter is, “Cool.” They are indeed cool, and harrowing, and hilarious – and the same can be said for just about every dazzlingly stylized instance of killer-on-killer mayhem through the whole last half of Ballerina. Before Eve arrives in her wintry hellhole, a previous scene's TV set was shown airing an old Buster Keaton classic that inspired laughs within unfathomable physical damage. At its best, that's what the John Wick series has provided. And even if Wiseman's brutal entertainment isn't on par with the franchise's first and fourth installments, it's hard to complain too much about an offshoot for which disreputable greatness is only a spin, lift, and leap away.
THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME
In Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, Bill Murray plays God, and as the actor has been a presence in nearly all of the writer/director's fastidiously composed comedies dating back to 1998's Rushmore, I suppose you could see the casting as either madly inspired or deeply redundant. You could view the movie itself either way, too – or, as I did, as a sometimes uneasy blend of both descriptions. Among the works in his increasingly Byzantine, ornate, pastel-colored filmography, Anderson's latest is simplicity itself nestled within a shell of outrageous complication, its numerous globe-hopping detours and truly ridiculous assemblage of famous faces combining for a swift, clever, oftentimes very funny fable that could only be the product of its particular creator. That said, I'll admit I liked this thing better when it wasn't quite so manically busy and was titled The Royal Tenenbaums.
On first glance, and despite Murray's participation in both, that 2001 masterpiece couldn't have less in common with Anderson's 2025 concoction, which finds widely loathed industrialist Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) on a mission to save his fortune, and his life, with a global business venture that'll net untold riches and reunite him with his estranged novitiate daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton, a spiritual and vocal dead-ringer for real-life mom Kate Winslet). Designed as a collective, connected series of Salinger-esque short-story vignettes, The Royal Tenenbaums is cool, measured, and emotionally astute. The Phoenician Scheme, in contrast, is madcap, slapdash, and unapologetically silly. Yet the films' arcs are the same – terrible absent father tries to mend ways with his family before his passing – and so are their ultimate outcomes, where the pleasures of enormous wealth and privilege are finally outweighed by the pleasures of the comfortably mundane: riding around on a garbage truck with your grandkids in one; a card game and shots of whiskey in another. But with Anderson's new precious jewel box of a movie, isn't a lot of unnecessarily showy technique, and considerable narrative energy, being employed merely to reach a basic “appreciate the people in your life” moral? In short, regarding the Anderson oeuvre: Haven't we been here before?
Because it's Anderson, the 105 minutes spent reaching the inevitable hardly amount to time wasted, and it's only in comparison to the auteur's more impressive outings of the past dozen years – The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, his quartet of Roald Dahl shorts for Netflix – that I left mildly disappointed with this one. As is traditional, the symmetrical compositions are routinely breathtaking (the opening-credits shot of Zsa-Zsa's bathroom seen from above is damned near applause-worthy), and the deadpan wisecracks and punchlines continue to satisfy, with del Toro more comically assured than he's perhaps ever before been on-screen. Yet while Threapleton is a consistent pleasure as the nun whose eye makeup, killer instincts, and (non-wardrobe-related) habits imply she's wrong for her vocation, and despite Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston emerging as the comedy team you didn't know you needed, Anderson's cast is, rather unusually, not terribly well-served.
Seemingly no end of Anderson veterans make appearances: F. Murray Abraham; Mathieu Amaltric; Richard Ayoade; Benedict Cumberbatch; Willem Dafoe; Hope Davis; Rupert Friend; Scarlett Johansson; Stephen Park; Jeffrey Wright. (The list is so heavy it almost forces you to ask, “What did Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman do to piss Anderson off?”) Additional talents such as Riz Ahmed, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Scott Shepherd show up for their first go-'rounds. Beyond a scattered smile or two, though, none of them provide much outside name recognition, and in the end, the only true – and truly novel – reason for non-completists to catch The Pheonician Scheme is Michael Cera's deliriously daffy performance as Bjørn Lund. Playing this Norwegian entomologist (with a Swedish Chef accent) whose every awkward, loopy reading is a thing of unclassifiable beauty, Cera is a comic goldmine here, as well as an Anderson-ian figure we've never seen before. I doubt this was Cera's audition reel for his director's unofficial repertory company, but if it was, the dude just nailed it.
DANGEROUS ANIMALS
Because I always root for underdogs in summer-blockbuster season, and because I inherently dig shark thrillers, I was really, really hoping that director Sean Byrne's Dangerous Animals would be the weekend's unexpected, out-of-nowhere treat. It seemed to have all the makings: a demented Australian serial killer (Jai Courtney) who force-feeds victims to underwater predators; a feisty heroine (Hassie Harrison) doing a riff on Blake Lively in The Shallows; a co-distribution deal by the folks at Shudder, a company that has shepherded a bunch of worthy horror titles into recent big-screen release. I'm consequently a little heartbroken to say that Byrne's and screenwriter Nick Lepard's offering is agonizingly bad, and a specific failure regarding the three elements that made it inherently promising.
Working backward, and to let the generally-more-reliable Shudder off the figurative hook, Byrne's film isn't the least bit scary. There's a semi-surprising yet absolutely inevitable killing in the first 15 minutes, but after that, it's one long, laborious building of non-suspense after another. Harrison may somewhat resemble Jennifer Lawrence, and her intrepid-survivor role may be fashioned as one of Lawrence's spunky Hunger Games ass-kickers, but the actor herself is one-note and grating, and her reactions rarely seem to make sense in any given situation. (She treats being held captive by a murderous loon as nothing more than a pesky inconvenience, and Harrison's climactic scene of high peril, which is already laughably dumb, is made unintentionally hysterical through the beatific calm of her gaze.)
And while he's absolutely not helped by his ludicrous role, Courtney is, I'm sorry, painfully terrible. You can easily blame the script's conception of his hiding-in-plain-sight serial killer for many of the actor's most wretched moments: the guy's tendency to monologue in the manner of a laughably inept Bond villain; his haphazard means of executing “foolproof” murderous plans; his obsessive need to document his psychopathic doings on VHS, which at one point – I'm not kidding – requires a trip to a secondhand store while his docked boat has a victim cufflinked to one of its beds. Most of what's wrong with Jai Courtney's portrayal, though, is pure telegraphing, with unimaginable evil evidenced by his nutjob grinning inappropriately and popping his eyes and salaciously dancing in his underwear; if such a thing exists, his is a classically embarrassing serial-killer performance. Dangerous Animals isn't any kind of tasty summertime diversion. It's merely chum.
