‘Ballerina’ and the empty task of fighting like a girl

Early on in “Ballerina” there’s a montage of Eve (Ana de Armas) getting beat up. 

It’s a pretty fun montage, and sort of what the “John Wick” universe is all about. For as much as Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a formidable assassin, part of the fun is seeing how much of a beat down he can take and watching him limp his way back into the fight. 

In the middle of this montage, Eve’s mentor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) is advising Eve on how to beat bigger, stronger opponents. Eve will always be smaller and weaker than the men she’ll be up against, Nogi says, reprimanding Eve for letting her opponents dictate the rules of their engagement. 

Nogi stares an angry Eve down, before advising her to “fight like a girl.” Eve looks determined. The music swells. I rolled my eyes. 

It’s not that “Ballerina” (officially called “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,” because God forbid the audience have to figure out anything for themselves) isn’t good. In fact, the action is pretty rad, drawing everything that works so well about the “John Wick” franchise as a whole. But the story surrounding that action falls flat, falling into pitfalls that plague so many movies about female action heroes, and drawing on a girl power narrative that it does nothing to earn. Much like Eve at the end of the film, I am tired. 

Before Eve became an assassin trained by the Ruska Roma (the same secret organization that brought Wick in as a child), she lived with her father on a remote island, hiding from a shadowy, cult of assassins that he used to belong to and who want to take Eve back. When the cult kills Eve’s father, she is taken in by the Ruska Roma, but longs to get revenge on those who orphaned her. 

Directed by Len Wiseman (with an assist from “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski) “Ballerina” does not lack in the action department. It can even be a little heavy handed in referencing the slapstick sensibilities that make the “John Wick” franchise so much fun – at one point, Eve bashes someone’s head in with a TV remote, and the channel flips to the famous sequence from “Steamboat Bill, Jr” where a house falls down around Buster Keaton. But in this case, subtlety is not what you want, and certainly not at the expense of the film’s excess of silliness. In one scene, Eve and a wayward bartender get into a brawl, abandoning all semblance of style and instead choosing to crack plates over one another’s heads, one after the other. That “Looney Tunes,” bombastic style of humor is what sets the franchise apart. 

De Armas handles the combat with propulsiveness and grit, proving she has the physical chops to handle action filmmaking. Everything is totally visceral – except for one minor detail that’s emblematic of a larger problem. 

After almost every single fight – after shattering a sheet of glass with her entire body, after being thrown backward by the explosive force of a bomb, after a grown man literally explodes in her face during a thrilling sequence featuring heavy use of hand grenades –  Eve hasn’t so much as smudged her lipstick, much less acquired bruises and scrapes. In fact, her face stays clean and blemish free until the film’s final act, where she finally gets some cute little spots of blood to contour with. 

I normally don’t love critiquing a movie by comparing it to others, but Lionsgate clearly wants us to associate “Ballerina” with the rest of the “John Wick” franchise – again, I point you to the film’s full title. In any given “John Wick” film, part of the fun is watching Wick’s body break down, the wear and tear that he has taken over the years coming through in his movements and even in his voice. In contrast, Eve walks away from most altercations with nary a hair out of place. She’s strong, she can fight, and – most importantly! – she looks hot while doing it. 

You might think me finicky for noticing this, but the choice feels, for lack of a better term, icky. It feeds into the vague and eye-roll inducing girl power narrative that “Ballerina” puts forth – something that the film doesn’t care to think about beyond pithy one-liners – and, what’s worse, goes completely against the type of performances de Armas is trying to give. Eve’s anger is her driving force – she grunts, yells, and screams her way through every part of her life. And yet, the film seems to be more interested in keeping her pretty. 

As the credits rolled, a new Evanescence song called “Fight Like a Girl” blared throughout the theater. Maybe I should be used to corporatized attempts at pandering to my womanhood by now, but when it’s this brazen, it’s a little too much to stomach. 

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