Latest John Wick film is #MeToo with a flamethrower

The movie Ballerina is more or less two hours of former Bond girl Ana de Armas killing people.

Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Murray Close

Ballerina (MA15+)
125 minutes
In cinemas

★★

If you’re of a mind to watch former Bond girl Ana de Armas kill lots of men, then Ballerina, the fifth film in the John Wick franchise, will deliver. It’s Me Too with a flamethrower. If you are after something a little more complex, or even something with a decent plot and sharp dialogue, then you need to look elsewhere.

“Fight like a girl,’’ a trainer for the Ruska Roma crime syndicate advises Eve Macarro (Armas) when she is bested by a male trainee. They re-enter the ring and Eve kicks him in the testicles. It’s only training, so it’s not til after she’s graduated that we see her knife and shoot men in the testicles.

Eve - the dialogue about the Garden of Eden is unbearable - has joined the Ruska Roma, home of John Wick, to seek revenge. In the opening scenes, the young Eve is a ballet student and her father comes to an unfortunate end at the hands of men with X scars on their wrists.

She meets John Wick (Keanu Reeves) while still in training. He tells her she has a choice: to continue to train to be an assassin or to walk out the front door. No prizes for guessing her decision. Other John Wick regulars such as Winston Scott (Ian McShane), manager of the Continental Hotel in New York, also appear.

The X-men are in a cult that is based in or near the Czech Republic. They are headed by The Chancellor (Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, who struggles with the accent).

The Ruska Roma, run by The Director (Anjelica Huston), and the cult have been in a truce for a couple of centuries. This changes when Eve goes rogue to try to kill The Director, and any Xs who stand in the way.

It’s this desire for vengeance that leads to the best part of this movie directed by Len Wiseman and written by Shay Hatten, a co-writer of JW3 and JW4. If the truce is to be preserved, Eve will need to be eliminated. If you’re The Director and you need to kill someone, who you gonna call?

This movie is more or less two hours of Eve killing people. The plot is full of holes and the only good lines in the script come when John Wick reappears. “This is suicide. It’s f..king John Wick!” says one of the X-men. “He’s only one man,’’ replies his female comrade.

Again, no prizes for guessing who’s right. I think the John Wick franchise, which has grossed more than $1bn at the box office, was terrific at the beginning, disappointing last time in Chapter 4 and should rest on its laurels. JW: Chapter 5 is on the drawing board. I hope the filmmakers, and the star, decide to take it somewhere unexpected.

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The Great Lillian Hall (M)
111 minutes
In cinemas
★★★★

Jessica Lange has two Academy Awards to her name: best supporting actress for Tootsie (1982) and best actress for Blue Sky (1994). In 2016 she won a Tony Award for her work on stage, as the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

She brings her skills to The Great Lillian Hall in a performance that deserves another Oscar nomination.

Lillian Hall (Lange) is the “first lady of the American stage”. She had trod the boards for almost half a century and is about to star in a Broadway run of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. In rehearsals, however, she forgets her lines, which unsettles the director (Jesse Williams) and sends shivers up the spine of the producer (Cindy Hogan).

There’s an understudy who won raves for her performance in the same role in Boston, but Lillian is determined to push on. “The play is my life right now and no one is going to take that away from me.” The director, under pressure from the producer, compares himself with an obstetrician. “You save the child no matter what.”

What unfolds is a commanding drama that touches on Chekhov and on Shakespeare, with Lange in full control as a woman, an artist, who is losing control. When she first forgets her lines she spits the dummy and asks if any of the younger cast members have heard of Stanislavski.

The other main characters are Lillian’s long-time assistant (Oscar winner Kathy Bates, who warns the star, “Believe it or not I can tell when you are acting”) and Lillian’s adult daughter (Lily Rabe), who remembers her childhood as “Mum, dad and the theatre. There wasn’t room for anything else.” If there was an Oscar for cameo performances Pierce Brosnan would be in the running as Lillian’s neighbour in the Vanderbilt Building in Manhattan. When she tells him to put on more clothes, the actor, who was People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in his 007 days, replies that once people paid him to undress. When she asks him to kiss her, so she can remember it, like a forgotten line, it is a beautiful moment.

Lillian sees her late husband, a theatre director, in dreams and sometimes when she is awake.

When she reflects on her own abandoned childhood she recalls the first time she walked on the stage. “I wasn’t me any more. I was strong and brave and interesting’’ - she pauses - “and beautiful.”

That’s the question Lillian faces as the production moves towards opening night.

“I’m still more me than not?’’ she asks her assistant. Jessica Lange is still the brilliant Jessica Lange in this fine film directed by actor and dramatist Michael Cristofer and written by Elisabeth Seldes Annacone, in a loose adaptation of the career of her aunt Marian Seldes (1928-2014), an award-winning stage actor.