FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA

Name: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA
Item: FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA
Author: Review

"It’s Mostly About Vengeance"

Family Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA is an action thriller. Ana de Armas stars as Eve, an orphaned girl who trains to be a female assassin in an assassin’s guild of Russian gypsies. Her first assignment reminds her of the men who murdered her father when she was little. Eve decides to seek vengeance against the leader of the men who murdered her father. However, his lair is a mountain town in Austria where all the people are part of his vicious cult of killers.

BALLERINA features a nonstop string of sometimes impressive and clever, but very violent, gunfights, knife fights and combat. The violence includes head shots, bodies blown up, people on fire, and a fair amount of blood spraying. It’s not gory, but it’s extreme. BALLERINA also has some strong foul language. Thematically and morally, the major problem is that the heroine seeks vengeance for her father’s murder, not justice. She does save a little girl’s life, but that comes as an afterthought to her desire for vengeance. So, FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA is excessive and unacceptable.

Content:

(PaPa, B, C, LL, VVV, A, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong pagan worldview where heroine seeks vengeance against the criminal man who had his men murder her father after a huge battle, mitigated by some moral actions such as protecting the lives of a young woman and two young girls, two positive father-daughter relationships, but the grandfather is ruthless and uncaring, and there are a few light Christian references, but they aren’t developed very strongly;

Foul Language:

About 12 obscenities (including about eight “f” words), one profanity using the word Christ, and one OMG profanity;

Violence:

Lots of nearly constant very strong and strong action violence with some blood spraying and people set on fire and bodies exploding includes multiple gunfights, multiple headshots, people catch on fire when two people fight with flamethrowers, people fight with small grenades, man sets his house to explode when assassins invade it, woman suffers wound on stomach and stab wound on shoulder, woman cauterizes her stomach wound, lots of hand-to-hand combat and martial arts fighting, attempted strangulations, people fight with knives and other sharp objects so there are some stabbings, people smash objects into other people, people get flung over tables or against walls and objects, woman uses samurai sword against henchmen, young woman trains to be a ballerina as a front and keeps falling in one scene while practicing a twirl, and the floor is bloodied by her injuries of falling (there’s a glimpse of her bloodied big toe), etc.;

Sex:

No sex;

Nudity:

No nudity;

Alcohol Use:

Brief alcohol use;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Plot deals with criminal organizations and assassins, but there is one bodyguard assignment, and the villain is a grandfather.

More Detail:

BALLERINA is an action thriller from the world of the JOHN WICK movies where a young female assassin, trained by an assassin’s guild of Russian gypsies, disobeys her boss and follows a trail leading to the nihilistic leader of a criminal cult of assassins who killed her father. FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA features a nonstop string of sometimes impressive and clever, but very violent, gunfights, knife fights and vicious hand-to-hand combat, but, although the villain is pretty despicable, the heroine is moved mostly by vengeance, even though she saves a little girl and helps the girl reunite with her father.

Then movie opens with young Eve sitting with her favorite toy, a little glass encased music box of a ballerina dancing to SWAN LAKE. The house where she and her father are hiding out is invaded by a group of assassins sent to punish or kill her father. Her father tries to fight the men off, but he’s eventually captured. An older man approaches them and chastises the father for taking Eve away from him. It later turns out that the older man is Eve’s grandfather and the father-in-law. The older man steps away from the room, and the father manages to escape with Eve. However, he’s mortally wounded, and Eve is picked up by the local police.

Enter Winston, the manager of The Continental Hotel in New York, a hotel that serves as a sanctuary for international assassins. He takes Eve by the hand and offers to bring her to her father’s roots with the assassin’s guild among the Russian gypsies, or Ruska Roma. The Director of the guild is a woman, who also trained John Wick after he was orphaned.

Cut to years later. Eve has been trained to be a female assassin for the Ruska Roma. Her first assignment is to protect a gypsy princess who’s being targeted by some Korean assassins. She and the princess barely escape with their lives.

However, during the fighting, Eve saw that one of the assassins had an X brand similar to a brand that the leader of her father’s assassins sported. She asks permission from the Director to seek out the leader and exact vengeance for her father’s death. The Director denies permission, however. She explains that the leader of those assassins belongs to a ruthless, nihilistic cult of assassins. Eve’s father had married the leader’s daughter but wanted to separate Eve from him when her mother died. Long ago, the Ruska Roma and the cult leader had agreed to a truce between them, but, if Eve went after her grandfather, it would lead to total war between the two groups.

Eve decides to disobey the Director anyway. She travels to the Continental Hotel and calls in a favor from Winston. He tells her there’s a member of her grandfather’s assassins’ cult who’s hiding out at the Continental Hotel sanctuary in Prague.

When she arrives at the hotel, she’s surprised to learn that the man, like her father, is trying to hide his own daughter, Ella, from the cult. Unhappily, however, Eve’s grandfather has sent a team to the hotel to kidnap the man’s daughter and bring her back to the cult’s lair, which turns out to be located somewhere in Austria. Eve and the man, whose name is Daniel, try to fight them off, but Danel is seriously, or even fatally, wounded, Eve knocked unconscious, and Ella taken.

Despite this turn of events, Eve is even more determined to locate her grandfather’s lair. However, the location turns out to be a mountain town in Austria filled with cult members. Eve is gonna need more guns.

The gunfights and other fights in BALLERINA keep escalating. At one point, Eve and one of the villain’s henchmen go toe to toe with two flamethrowers. Another scene has Eve and the henchmen fighting with small grenades. The filmmakers are smart at keeping the fighting realistic otherwise, however. For example, Eve naturally doesn’t have the physical strength of all the men she’s fighting. So, she relies on her brains and clever use of objects around her. Also, although much of the fighting is brutal, the filmmakers insert some humor. For example, in one scene Eve fights a female cook in a restaurant kitchen. They fight over a gun, but the gun gets hidden by a bunch of plates that have fallen to the floor. So, Eve and the woman keep smashing plates against each other to locate the gun.

BALLERINA has some strong foul language. Also, the violence includes head shots, bodies being blown up, and people set on fire, with a fair amount of blood spraying. The violence isn’t gory like some horror movies or war movies, but it’s extreme.

Thematically and morally, the major problem with BALLERINA is that the heroine is seeking vengeance for her father’s murder, not justice. Although she saves the gypsy princess in the beginning and saves the little girl at the end, those actions come too much like an afterthought to her desire for vengeance. So, FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA is excessive and unacceptable.