Ballerina: ASMR for Action Fans

This movie wanted to be as enjoyable, well-crafted, and brainless as possible, with delightful results

I’ve never seen a John Wick movie prior to seeing Ballerina last week. A film with Ana de Armas as a raised for contracted killing orphan in John Wick’s organization the Rusca Roma, Ballerina knows what it is. You would think this is trivial. It is not.

There’s one scene where a character hits another with a remote while several known slapstick bits play on each channel. Is this heavy handed? Yes! It’s fun! We’re having fucking fun! Everyone is doing a stupid and bad accent in this movie! At some point our protagonist duct tapes a kitchen knife to a pistol, handle to handle, blade and barrel at resulting 90 degree angles. This is the dumbest shit in the world and the movie knows it and it wants you to be able to fucking relax for like one second and just enjoy a delightful, dumb, fun movie that was made with a sneaky amount of skill and craft.

This movie was far from flawless, apart from lack of plot or seriousness. It had an apparent ban on dialect coaches (this was funny and fun) and dance teachers (the ballet in this film profoundly offended my sensibilities but had the sense to move on immediately and never return to it again. It also had a sort of self aware wink at Black Swan style noire dance films, which I have to respect), was incredibly artfully made.

Harjas Sandhu

replied to my note mentioning this draft by saying that this film (and franchise) is porn for stunt people, and good lord, that somehow undersells it. This movie is one mostly unbroken fight sequence, designed by an apparent committee of people sitting around a table and coming up with the most ludicrous and improbably set pieces they possibly could. I’ve never seen so many delightfully surprising flips and grapples and improvised weapons (the knife/gun is only the most memorable, something of a fourth wall break in dumb shiv form), and it was all incredibly entertaining. The movie, in addition to wanting to provide fun-to-watch action sequences, took pleasure in making them surprising the way a skilled comedian plays with expectations. Fight choreography as slapstick humor is a sensational play that this film worked with very reliably.

I also somewhat enjoyed that the film seemed to play with exhaustion with badass 110 pound beauties who can throw around grown men with three times their lean mass - an instructor tells the main character that she will always be smaller and weaker than men, so her responsibility is not to win on their terms, but to change the rules of the game. The movie doesn’t always succeed in giving her action sequences that seem plausible for her build and opponents, but it wants you to know that it thought about that and put its whole ass into designing absolutely ludicrous fight elements to distract you from the fact that she takes like eight kicks to the head in under five minutes that each should have flattened her in one go.

foley artistry is insanely textured, every punch lands with incredible attention to surroundings and atmosphere, it crunches. I love a good well-organized soundscape, and this film had sound effects that jumped out of the screen so dramatically that I suspect the sound mixing was atypical. Every environmental detail shows up in brilliant color in the sound effects of the punches, the falls, the smashes. Glass, ice, metal, wood - hollow or dense, flame thrower or snow, you can hear every inch of this movie and it gives it a supreme aliveness.

In general, the movie is sensory, with costuming that was better than it had a right to be. The costuming wouldn’t stand out in most flicks, to be clear, but the lushness of its sound was matched to the thick fur Ana De Armas wears to a nightclub, the delicate dancer costumes for the Rusca Roma girls, the understated chic black with gold jewelry ensembles for Catalina Sandino Moreno. Kitting out Angelica Huston in glorious red and black outfits and setting her free on a gothic ballet studio set was exceptional work.

I loved this dumb movie. It was so dumb. I cannot emphasize how stupid it was enough times. It wasn’t trying to be smart, but it was trying to be good anyway, and there was something refreshingly physical about its efforts to appeal to every part of me but my higher brain processing. Dazzling physicality of fights, funny little details, pristine sound cues with eerie tinkling music boxes, a sequined dress that I could perfectly imagine the feel of. Flawless, all flawless.

I loved it the way I love perfume that is loud bordering on ludicrous in some key, theoretically desirable dimension - sexy, floral, gourmand, woody, I love a perfume that’s doing too much and knows it. This movie wanted you to catch its base notes from 40 yards away and upwind and good GOD was it funny about it.

This movie’s plot serves its set pieces, not the other way around. Why yes, we want to see literal Hallstatt and watch people run a chase scene up and down a rickety multi-level Alpine town. Yes, I want to see Gabriel Byrne pretending to know how to truss a moose (I swear to god the movie put him next to a moose, which doesn’t make any sense at all, but I might have simply misread the deer) in a magnificent river stone hunting lodge. Yes, I want to watch a man make a pun on his clearly visible name tag. Yes, I want to watch Keanu show up and wreck face in a predictable way. Sensational, sensational, sensational, every last bit of this silly little movie.