2w ago

Ballerina - A Stylish But Sidelined Spin on the John Wick Legacy

sxy.xyz Ballerina (2025)

There’s a particular genre of moviegoing now, call it Franchise Bereavement, where, sitting eyes glazed before the flickering remnants of a oncevital series, you feel less the thrill of pulp

Ultimately, this film pirouettes elegantly on the surface but stumbles where the narrative heart should beat strongest. It’s a cinematic recital that, while skillfully orchestrated, fails to hit the truly resonant notes expected from a story of vengeance and identity.

23 comments

Ballerina is a 90's action movie, and in that respect it's pretty awesome. The story doesn't matter, because it's so over the top and ridiculous.

That flamethrower fight though...
- It was a legitimate depiction of a firefighting technique, and I think we can all respect realistic action in films.
  
  I'd be interested to know if that works in real life.
  
  Bonus: They did it for real:
  https://youtube.com/shorts/cdNvw6PAvmw
- I probably enjoyed that the most! But the part where fire vs water...
  
  That was actually the most realistic part. Everything else was a bit less so. The fight is only possible with Hollywood unreal bravery, they grossly undermine the scariness of heat and smoke. I get that they were mostly murderous psychopaths, but fear of fire is very primal. Even in war flamethrowers were mostly to create area denial to flush troops out of entrenched positions. Fighting flame against flame is guaranteed mutual suicide.

I mean, it's in line with everything else John Wick. Nothing too far from belief, action scenes are solid. My only 'wtf' was why the sister plot point was at all needed since they killed her literally 2 minutes after the 'big reveal'
- Your only gripe and yet you don't mention the absolute bullshit of the first fight scene w/ paramilitary raiding the defended chateau? Pfft. There's so much simply half-assed & masturbatory in that first 10 minutes of the flick, I'm confident the rest of the movie was jerkily dribbled out and getting cold by the time they sent it to production.

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Fluffy fight film.
- That's a lot of letters to say "PoS" 🤪
  
  The alliteration is fun.

I very much liked the movie, it was what I expected of it.
This article does read like a GPT generated text because of the way it's paragraphed, titled and worded. Doesn't read very comfortably.

Wasn't there a martial arts flick out of Asia somewhere by the same name, recently?
That looked promising, but this? I couldn't make it through the first fight scene (first scene, FWIW) without losing all faith in its ability to come back from its numerous wtf moments. 🙄
- Korean movie from 2023, I very much preffered the Korean movie.

23 comments