With Eyes East

I was ready, as soon as I’d seen the trailer last year, to see a review for Ballerina here as part of an ongoing conversation (with myself). In 2020, I’d written about Furie, a female-led Vietnamese action movie addled by flashbacks. Later, it was The Villainess, a Korean action movie with at least two set pieces now canonical to the genre, but which didn’t fully believe in its female lead. It’s now 2024, and in the time since, I’ve actually avoided a lot of the female-led action movies that seem to be a natural byproduct of the genre’s current renaissance (if everyone’s making action movies, some of them are gonna star women). I mean, ten years earlier, I would’ve given a limb to see “Mary Elizabeth Winstead the action star” in something like Kate, but alas. It could be option paralysis, because there are a lot of these movies, but I also wonder if the many, varied disappointments over the years have burrowed into my subconscious, impacting whatever impulse it is that I hit play instead of browsing on. Furie and The Villainess especially seemed to follow the formula nearly perfectly, nearly, and Ballerina is very much the next example in that sequence.

Directed by Lee Chung-hyun, a fellow not much older than myself, and starring Jeon Jong-seo, Ballerina is a female-led Korean action movie wearing its influences proudly. Flashes of The Raid, Oldboy, and even Breaking Bad, but most unmistakable – and maybe predictable – is John Wick. Funnily enough, the John Wick series has long meant to spin off a film also entitled Ballerina. I wonder if it’ll end up being Ballerina: From the World of John Wick, or has that practice mercifully run its course? Regardless, the reason this post isn’t a review is because I’ll need to do spoilers in order to discuss the question this movie raises, on the difference between genre literacy and plagiarism.

Which – whoa – way too harsh. That’s not really what we’re talking about, I just can’t think of a succinct term to contrast with “genre literacy.” I ended up watching Ballerina because of a Polygon article recommending Korean action movies, as Dev Patel had cited them generally as an influence on his directorial debut Monkey Man. Whatever his own specific picks, the article mentions, for example, that the motorcycle chase in John Wick: Chapter 3 is lifted wholesale from The Villainess. It’s all part of the same conversation. Of course, John Wick is now the break in that conversation, with countless movies more imitating than “being influenced by.” You know: neon colors, gun MMA, upscale settings, and that camera thing where it tilts fast to follow an action. That one’s probably more from The Raid. And actually, what gets my particular goat isn’t the neon and the suits, it’s when the John Wick action style is leased by every kind of action hero. Assassins in a comic book world? Sure. Military and police stuff? No. Literally everything? No!

Ballerina shares John Wick’s heightened sense of reality, this one stopping just short of world-building. But you know, Jeon Jong-seo’s heroine Ok-ju takes a wine bottle to the head and keeps on fighting. And her urban backdrop is bathed in moody color, and captured by an artisanal lens. The movie is gorgeous, and the rhythm of the editing had me variously thinking of trailers, music videos, and Edgar Wright. It’s so snappy as to be almost witty, to almost possess an attitude, and that’s the ultimate net gain of the John Wick era: an insistence that the action is important, to be shot first-unit with filmic language consistent with everything else. Ballerina opens with a precise tracking shot in a convenience store, with the angled lines of shelves our sense of forward motion, and a funny clerk eating chips our focal point. Some thugs rush in – shot still dollying forward – and start throwing things around. The clerk gradually begins to notice. And this takes us into the robbery scene from the Cowboy Bebop movie. Ok-ju puts an item on the counter as the money begins to change hands, and the ensuing fight is fast, brutal, and beautiful (and, like the rest of the movie, oddly hip-hop inflected).

It’s the details of the action which favor the Korean influences over John Wick, as Ballerina is also cringe-inducingly violent. A midpoint set piece sees a knife penetrate a man’s cheek, and we watch it drive slowly through and over his tongue. But this opening scene actually sets a slightly incorrect tone, and where divergence from John Wick is a problem. A friendly clerk asks Ok-ju if she’s still working, like that cop in the first John Wick. In the third, John Wick says, “Guns. Lots of guns,” in a callback to The Matrix. In Ballerina, Ok-ju utters a similar line: “I need guns.” It’s classic. That’s like revving the engine. The difference – and the problem – is that she follows it with another, more curious line: “Help me out, please.”

It’s Jeon Jong-seo’s delivery. She’s desperate. This is a drama, well-suited to a performer of Jeon’s caliber. It follows that her character Ok-ju is vulnerable. Dimensional. Not a “strong female character,” but a good female character. Like with Furie, she has flashbacks which slow the inertia (we’ll come back to that later, but man, is it tempting to just interrupt this point with that one, as flashbacks often do).

So, when I was younger, I liked two things: action movies and women. Right? I’m a straight guy. And as much as I liked Arnold and RoboCop and Neo, I always wondered what it would be like if it was a woman instead. Right? I’m the only straight guy who makes sense. The female equivalent of the Terminator or Rambo is not necessarily a complicated character, and my frustration with the stance against “the strong female character” came from never getting that equivalent first. When we say “no, a good character,” I don’t see what we’re replacing. There’s nothing there.

This was my thought process years ago, at a time when I saw Winstead as action hero emerging in glimpses, in movies like Scott Pilgrim and the Thing remake/prequel. She was trending in a direction, and I did see Birds of Prey, and I liked that. John Wick kind of disrupts that thought process because, sure, he isn’t a complicated character, but in order to work, any action scene requires we first care about what’s going on, and John Wick scenes tend to work better than most. In that case, a lot of it is the performance, with the whole of it bordering on metanarrative more than narrative. I think it helped me realize that the uncomplicated action hero isn’t even a guilty, childhood pleasure, so long as the film around them is properly designed. And for the record, the Terminator, RoboCop, and Neo sometimes are complicated.

What I expected from Ballerina, and what I expected from movies like The Villainess and The Protégé and Sentinelle and Coffy and Colombiana and Mohawk and (to an extent) The Nightingale and Destroyer and shows like My Name and the recent Echo – just to name a few – is something unqualified (readers of this site and especially The Battle Beyond Planet X, I thank you for your patience). It’s why I never shut up about Prey and The Night Comes for Us and You’re Next, because those heroines don’t struggle, they just fucking wreck your fucking shit. And note that all three of those examples are horror or horror-adjacent. It’s why horror became attractive to me later in life, because of, say, the last kill in Evil Dead 2013. It’s why I drift to the rape-and-revenge subgenre, which is where I never want to be, man. Ms. 45 is a good movie, though. Check that out if you haven’t. There’s some real carnage there. But tell a guy “make an action movie with a woman as the star,” and it’s just never like that.

That opening scene in Ballerina sets the expectation. And I should say that the movie overall is an improvement on The Villainess, at least in terms of its strong female character. I love Kim Ok-vin, but man, Jeon Jong-seo plays a real hard case. She is tough. It’s just that after the opening, the movie proceeds to subvert expectations, sometimes accidentally. Like, guy shows up with a chain saw? Good subversion. Didn’t see that coming. But in a revenge movie, we kind of expect the avenger to work upward along a chain of command. There is indeed a chain of command, with villain Choi only a henchman to another character, Chief Jo. Well, let me tell you, she kills Jo before finally dealing with Choi. It’s not backwards, it’s like elastic.

Let’s consider the midpoint sequence (or thereabout), whose outcome determines our elasticity. So, Ok-ju’s on the revenge quest. She has a name – Choi – and soon enough, she has a location. After setting up a meeting, she watches him from a distance, then tails him back home. This is where I’m expecting an infiltration scene. She slips inside, right, takes out a few guards on the way? No. We cut to morning, and Choi leaves the house. Now she slips inside, and starts planting listening devices. Oh, okay. That’s cool. She also pokes around and finds out she’s essentially hunting Dennis Reynolds, because Choi has a closet of “fetish shit” and the modern equivalent of sex tapes – flash drives. He labels them not with names but descriptors, including the particularly gross “half-Japanese schoolgirl.” And of course, Ok-ju finds one labeled “ballerina.”

The contents of this flash drive trigger in Ok-ju a memory of her friend, and she leaves the house to be alone by a lake, where she lets out a pitiful cry. It’s hinted that her relationship with the titular ballerina, whose death incites the revenge quest, was a little more than just friendly, but what’s made textual is that the ballerina gave Ok-ju a renewed sense of life and purpose. But we’re really straying from the path here, guys. Later, she listens in on a phone conversation – apparently he lives in this house alone, so there wouldn’t have been guards – and picks up on a few keywords. He’s gonna be at a nightclub. So she goes to the nightclub and is sure to bump into him. She also orders a milkshake. Holy shit, why is this taking so long? She makes an impression on him – just by being there, really – and he takes her for a drive. Not to his home, because he claims to live with his parents, but to a special hotel.

This is where I’m really starting to get antsy, with flashbacks of my own to the Lady Snowblood manga. Like, why does she always have to get naked and almost raped before the sword comes out? Ok-ju sits there for a while as Choi talks about how awesome the hotel room is (if not for the sinister undertone, I’d almost say his performance here is endearing to the point of a miscast), like a grand Chinese palace. Then he spikes her wine and dons a gimp mask. That’s a little less endearing. And – hold on. This conflation of BDSM and sexual violence is throwing up all kinds of flags. Let’s be careful whose yum we yuck, Mr. Lee “I’m Dating the Lead Actress” Chung-hyun. This whole movie is fetish shit.

Ok-ju lies on the bed, eyes closed, as Choi strokes her face. Now’s the time to strike! No. Then he starts to get in her pants, and apparently, that’s the time to strike. Look at how many paragraphs I’ve been describing this sequence! How many opportunities she had! And here’s a spoiler: she doesn’t even kill him in this scene. Now, how would John Wick have handled this? I mean, by his own midpoint, he’s at the Red Circle. And there’s no way Ballerina had a budget as large as the original John Wick, but John Wick was relatively low budget (for a movie starring Keanu Reeves). I mean, if Ok-ju killed Choi in the hotel and then killed Chief Jo in the climax, I doubt that would require more budget than what actually happens: she doesn’t kill Choi in the hotel, and then kills Chief Jo and Choi in the climax. It’s the same shit, just the order is different!

And yes, that would’ve made for a different, more standard movie. That’s not my issue, although I’m pretty unclear on what this movie was going for instead. Like, I figured there was significance to Choi’s sex-tape label of “ballerina” matching her coming up on Ok-ju’s phone as “ballerina”? Given that’s the title, I wondered if it was gonna be about how little she knew about this person she’s getting revenge for, or include any kind of examination of the relationship motivating the action. What’s interesting is that, in the end, Ok-ju identifies herself as the ballerina, and the reason why the midpoint sequence is so drawn out is because she was trying to recreate Choi’s sexual abuse of the ballerina, even dressing up in one of her outfits. But, like, that needs some basis in the character, and Ok-ju never talks about identity or theatricality or ghosts. That would be pretty metal. But it’s a loose thread, the, you know, protagonist’s motives.

The real issue is, why take so much influence from John Wick, why place yourself so firmly in genre tradition, and not also embody its most crucial ingredient? There’s a scene where Ok-ju’s holding a guy’s head down against a table, and when he refuses to give her the info (“Fuck you, bitch!”), she smashes his sunglasses, forces the shards into his mouth, and then starts punching his cheek – the Chelsea method, again. It’s basically horror-adjacent, being incredibly violent and because this is the kind of character who exists in that kind of world. She’s torturing him not to get information, but because she’s angry. That’s what I want to see. Unqualified, unconflicted – committed – scary. No more “ex-military and now she’s on the run,” but “she’s the monster.” Fortunately, this momentum carries Ok-ju into the final kill, which is maybe the best (and funniest) final kill in any revenge movie. I thought that flamethrower was gonna be a total non sequitur.

Afterword

That first scene really is dynamite, and I saw how the film looked and felt and thought, “Whoa, this movie’s gonna be good. Why didn’t people like it that much?” And then there isn’t another action scene for, like, 30 minutes. But honestly, I didn’t mind too much. Ok-ju is super tough, and it’s cool to see somebody like that doing anything. That’s what I imagined this write-up being about, but by the end, it just had to be this — something I’ve been writing about for, like, a decade. In all that time, I’ve wanted to complain less and instead show, and finally, I’m almost there: the monstrous-feminine has started creeping into my comics anthology Martian Sun. Not as much as I’d like, because they’re short stories, and that format kind of lends itself to doomed heroes and punchline irony. But stay tuned! Apologies for the shameless self-promotion.