Thereâs a scene in 2025âs From the World of John Wick: Ballerina in which Ana De Armas, playing the ballerina assassin of the title, is forced to fend off an attack from an axe wielding assailant. Itâs a frantic sequence, with De Armas eventually snapping her attackerâs arm, hacking his back to shreds with the axe, and for the piĂšce de rĂ©sistance- with his head slumped over a smashed car door window, she graphically thrusts the axe into his forehead to finish him off. Itâs the kind of hyper violent finishing move that would have once been saved for the final boss fight, delivered as a kind of cathartic exclamation point to the misdeeds the villain has committed throughout, offering up the kind of gratuitous crescendo that every finale should come with.
However in the case of Ballerina the scene is almost superfluous, included as a throwaway moment during one of De Armasâ early missions, and not even a third of the way through the movie. For me itâs the perfect example of what I like to call the joyless bloodshed genre. A genre aesthetic which is defined not by the emotional content or relevance of violence within a scene, but rather solely on the fact of how creatively shocking the violence within a scene can Continue reading
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