From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, The Surfer and Chuck Chuck Baby are all in cinemas.
Editor’s Note: In addition to the three big screen releases, we’ve watched four (or is it even more) new documentaries at home this week but they’ll get a newsletter of their own later on.
The expansion of the John Wick franchise into four Keanu Reeves-led feature films, a television series about The Continental (the mysterious hotel chain that arranges the contracts for this shadowy world of hired killers), a comic book prequel, an animated film and now a spin-off feature called Ballerina, feels like the least desired “universe” in modern popular culture. At the very least, it is the franchise that has failed to understand what made the original so successful in the first place, following a film that was made with taste and care with an overstuffed concentration on lore and irrelevant but nerdy details.
Taste is something we don’t talk about enough in this business. I’m not talking about the difference between your taste and my taste (which is superior obviously) but when a film demonstrates good taste when it didn’t have to.
The first John Wick was tasteful in that way, despite the body count. Director Chad Stahelsky – a former stuntman – shot the action in longer takes than we are used to and from further away, allowing the choreography to flow, and for us to appreciate the skills of the performers. And DOP Jonathan Sela bathed it all in a glorious neon glow. I described it as more akin to watching modern dance than choppy 21st century action cinema and Reeves’ Zen-quality as Wick – single-minded, regretful, unemotional apart from the eyes – was haunting.
It was never intended to set up a franchise but it made too much money. And Lionsgate decided that what people loved was that whole cool-Hotel Continental thing and that all we needed for a spin-off to successfully imitate the original was to have Ian McShane, Lance Reddick and a brief Reeves cameo. They asked Underworld hack Len Wiseman to direct it so, clearly, taste wasn’t what they thought they needed and wasn’t what they were going to get.
I hated Ballerina. Ana de Armas plays a young woman who has been take under the wing of the aforementioned Mr. McShane and trained as an assassin after the murder of her father when she was a young child. When she is old enough, she decided to take that training and use it to find the men who killed him and extract her bloody revenge. When she gets to the top of the plot, she discovered an unlikely child abusing cult led by Gabriel Byrne in a beautiful and historic Alpine village. Lots of amazing vistas but no taste.
In Ballerina, several characters don’t have names, just functions: Anjelica Huston is The Director (of the assassin/ballet school), Byrne is known as The Chancellor. In Thomas Martin’s script for The Surfer (directed by Lorcan Finnegan and starring Nicolas Cage), most of the characters also go unnamed. Cage himself is The Surfer and Finn Little is The Kid (The Surfer’s son). But other characters are given names or nicknames – Julian McMahon is Scally, the villainous cult-leader and others in his gang are named Pitbull, Curly or Blondie.
The Surfer – the character – is a stressed-out businessman, separated from his wife, trying to build a relationship with his teenage son as well as buy back the house on the beach that the family lost when his father died tragically many years before. The existential weight is crushing him and when the ‘locals’ refuse him and his son’s access to the beach – “not from here, can’t surf here” –the humiliation pushes him into the kind of mental health crisis that only an actor of Cage’s bravery can portray.
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Over the next hour and a half, indignity on top of indignity is added until breaking point is reached. The growing realisation that this simple car park with a viewing area, cinder block toilet, barista and public telephone contains the seeds of a Wicker Man (orWake in Fright)-type descent into tormented folk-horror is expertly handled by Finnigan and Cage but The Surfer loses a star for me because I don’t think they quite knew how end it as well as they started it and middled it.
Finally, Chuck Chuck Baby is the name of the chicken packing factory in North Wales where a group of women toil away on the nightshift. Actually, it’s more banter than toil as they manage to interrupt the mundanity of their lives with lip-synching sessions to their favourite pop songs.
Louise Brealey is mousy Helen, nursing the dying mother (Sorcha Cusack) of her ex-husband during the day and keeping a low profile on the factory floor by night. He (Celyn Jones) is a crushing boor with a teenage girlfriend who has given him the child that Helen was unable to. Helen’s great teenage crush was the glamorous and free Joanne (Annabel Scholey) who escaped from the oppressive housing estate before she s trapped forever like Helen and her workmates.
When Joanne returns to clean up her late father’s stuff, the mutual crush is rekindled and love itself is kindled. Will these two manage to rise above the social expectations or will the pop songs of their youth inspire them to romantic fulfilment?
While the song choices – including Janis Ian, Minnie Ripperton, Neil Diamond and Northern Lights by Renaissance — are both inherently great and perfect for the characters the interludes go on too long and help pad the film out by about 15 minutes longer than the story can really justify.
