While catching up on my movie backlog this year, I’ve been pleasantly — no, more accurate to say unsettlingly — surprised at how much I enjoyed action movies like Ballerina, John Wick, Edge of Tomorrow, and even M3GAN 2.0.
In each case, I’ve watched them critically, making a note about all the times they include shallow characterization, plot contrivances, predictable or just lifeless dialogue, or any of the things that separate “real cinema” from mindless entertainment. And in each case (to varying degrees), I’ve gone away thinking that it just doesn’t matter; the end result just works.
I don’t want to discount the very real possibility that I’m just a simpleton who’s easily mesmerized by beautiful people, flashing lights, and swirling colors. But my “they’re fine, really” reaction to Jurassic World: Rebirth and Captain America: Brave New World was a case of forgiving the weaknesses in the storytelling because the action scenes or the overall vibe made up for it.
But I first noticed something different going on with John Wick. I still wouldn’t say that I loved it, but I did feel that the shallow characterization and extremely simple revenge plot, which I’d normally consider to be weaknesses that the action has to overcome, were actually the movie’s biggest strengths.
I’ve been hearing aficionados of fight choreography and practical effects describing the John Wick series as masterpieces of each, but I don’t usually consciously notice that stuff. I tend to think of storytelling as being the main element of a movie that everything else is in service to. And the storytelling in John Wick is so pared down to the most familiar basics that it does achieve the feeling of mythic fable that I believe the filmmakers were going for. Thinking too hard about John Wick’s motivations, or whether he’s a realistic character, would be like calling out the story of the labors of Hercules for being implausible.
And it was finally clarified for me in Ballerina. This was a movie that I didn’t buy for one second: the characters were all barely 1.5-dimensional at most, the revenge plot at its core didn’t move me in the slightest, the child in peril subplot left me unfazed, the conflict between Wick and Eve didn’t register, and even the appearances of outstanding actors like Anjelica Houston, Gabriel Byrne, and Ian McShane did nothing for me. And yet, I unreservedly loved the movie.
Afterwards, I saw criticism that said Eve had practically zero personality, which was a disappointing contrast against Ana de Armas’s character in No Time to Die, who was so immediately captivating that she was the highlight of the entire movie. That’s what made it click for me: it’s an understanding of what’s going to resonate with audiences, and recognizing exactly how much of something is needed to make the story work.
Ana de Armas is barely in No Time To Die; that movie seemed to go on forever, and it felt like her scenes maybe took a total of 15 minutes at most? But she was so full of personality that she outshone everyone else, especially Bond himself, who’s gradually become more and more of a cipher as long as the Casino Royale version of the franchise has gone on.
But de Armas is in almost every scene of Ballerina. And like Keanu Reeves in John Wick, she spends almost no part of it emoting, or really expressing any sort of desire for anything but revenge. As a result, there’s never any ambiguity to her motivations, and each time she’s on screen, you know within an instant what it is she’s there to accomplish. She spends the bulk of the last act just killing dudes without any dialogue.
It’s easy to see why audiences would think it’s a failing of the movie. After all, it’s almost trivially simple to imagine moments that would give her more personality, scenes that would heighten the drama of her revenge story and the details of her family history, or dramatic beats that would make all the action of the last act feel as if they had more personal stakes.
A character’s true identity is revealed in the last act, for instance, but they have barely any interaction before Eve is alone and acting on her own again. It’s easy to imagine all the different ways the movie might’ve shown them working together, or acting against each other, revealing more of Eve’s character along the way, right down to the tearful death scene, or the “let’s set aside our differences” scene, or the “finally I understand what you’re all about” scene, or the “you are the last obstacle I needed to overcome” scene.
It’s so easy to imagine them, in fact, that including them would’ve been superfluous. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that the screenwriters were incapable of creating effective, believable, emotional beats, but simply that there’s no version the movie could show you that would work better than the versions the audience have already formulated in their heads.
If it’s a gut-punchingly impactful moment, that’s going to drag down the pacing and put all of the focus on that scene. If it’s an understated and realistic character beat, then that’s going to have audiences pausing to process the things that have been left artfully ambiguous. If it’s a simple one that keeps the action moving, then it would make everything seem even more shallow and dumb. And again, it’s unnecessary, because the audience has already imagined a version of those moments that they instantly connect with. It makes more sense for the movie to show us the things that we can’t imagine and aren’t expecting, like flamethrower battles or two assassins smashing plates on each other’s heads.
You can really tell this is the case from the final act scenes between Wick and Eve, which don’t really accomplish much for the story as far as I could tell, and which did distract from the pacing. I already knew how this was going to play out, even before it happened, and any twist on that would’ve felt like a cheap surprise for its own sake. In a movie full-to-bursting with fight scenes and action movie moments, it was the only sequence that felt to me like it existed only out of obligation to the requirements of an action movie franchise.
And I think the same thing is going on with the inclusion of Houston, Byrne, and McShane. We know that they’re all capable of great performances, so it could seem that they’re given nothing to work with, or that they’re just here for the paycheck (which might be true), but I think the reality is that they’re present just for their presence. Our lead and guest lead are intentionally blank slates, and these actors aren’t really here as character actors. Instead, they’re given just enough distinct characterization to suggest character moments.
It doesn’t feel like shallow or ineffective storytelling to me, so much as restraint. And once I noticed it in this franchise, I could see it in other movies that I enjoyed more than I’d expected.
In Edge of Tomorrow, the characters played by Bill Paxton and Brendan Gleeson feel like action movie stereotypes, but I think that’s the point. You pretty much instantly know who they are and what role they fill in the story. Similarly, the movie plays around with the time loops, choosing exactly what to show and what not to show, for several different reasons: comedy, the sense of a long passage of time, dramatic irony between the leads, or to represent the main character’s redemption arc. In every case, there’s a feeling that they’re taking advantage of what the audience needs to see vs what the audience has effectively already seen in their minds.
I’ve always felt like action movies require a kind of disconnect, a willingness to suspend your disbelief and forgive the cheesy parts for the sake of well-executed fight scenes, special effects, and pyrotechnics. Not the “just turn your brain off!” dim-wittedness of the Transformers franchise or the like, but more a simple and obvious acknowledgement that different movies are trying to do different things. Sometimes you have to sacrifice depth or complexity in favor of action and pacing.
So I appreciate having a new way to consider movies, where I don’t think of it as always being a sacrifice or a failing, but sometimes as a deliberate choice. If nothing else, it’s a reminder of just how much thought and how much work often goes into making a movie. Plus, it helps get rid of the concept of a “guilty pleasure,” or at least the snobbish insistence that there’s a distinction between an effective movie and a “genuinely good” one.
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