The first four “John Wick” films, starring Keanu Reeves, are fantastic and artful orgies of death with stunner locations such as Sacré-Cœur stairs in Paris and the Moroccan desert. The imagery is often breathtaking, and Reeves’ steely resolve more than makes up for the thinness of the plots.
Too bad “Ballerina” drops the ball. Despite being led by an actress who once took on the role of Marilyn Monroe, it’s a much less attractive movie — downright ugly sometimes. The fights are as brutal and thrilling as they should be: knives to the face, hammers to the face, grenades to the face.
But the tale of Eve, whose assassin father was offed before she was taken to the Ruska Roma in New York to be trained in the dark arts by a phoning-it-in Anjelica Huston, is a recycled schlep. A blah de bourrée. This Len Wiseman-directed flick is 45 minutes shorter than “John Wick 4,” but spiritually, it’s longer than jury duty.
Whereas John Wick traveled to exotic places and fought in architecturally fun spaces — museums filled with mirrors and glass, art-deco vaults — much of “Ballerina” takes the aughts route of “Alias” with Jennifer Garner: nightclubs.
There’s shootout after shootout in implausible nntz-nntz dancefloors. Everywhere Eve goes has a whiff of Berlin.
Except, that is, the one place that finally perks up our depressed eyeballs. Her rogue search takes her to a creepily quiet, snowy village in Austria, where it turns out every resident is an assassin. A blood-soaked Stepford.
The best skirmish happens inside a lodge-y restaurant there, where, it turns out, the cook is a professional killer. The dastardly chef wants to make schnitzel out of Eve.
Soon after comes a groaner of a battle, in which Eve combats a flame-thrower-wielding blond man with a water hose.
