MILAN – The news is recent and quite fresh: in 2025 the John Wick saga will have a spin-off, a new film that will open another front from which there will probably be no turning back: Ballerina, directed by Len Wiseman and the story of a very young dancer, Rooney (Ana de Armas), who becomes a killer (obviously). In short, yet another mutation of an unexpected franchise that relaunched Keanu Reeves, allowing him to find a second life in Hollywood. Among the four films shot, the last one released in 2023, the most powerful probably remains John Wick 3: Parabellum – which today you can stream on Netflix, Prime Video, NOWtv – and which has become a small classic of cinema set in Manhattan, with references to a cult like The Violent Arm of the Law and the atmosphere of nighttime Gotham filmed (for those who remember) by Kathryn Bigelow – friend of Keanu Reeves since Point Break – in Blue Steel.
Pure ultra pop show in which John Wick – a true last action hero – starting from a rain-soaked Times Square colored by purple and white neon-style Blade Runnerruns to the New York Public Library, looking for a book of Russian fairy tales. Reeves' silent and twilight John Wick, in John Wick 3 – Parabellum but he can't stop. It must not stop. He runs away from something, he runs towards someone and the only thing he can really do, chased by all the criminals of Manhattan is this: escape. There's a bounty, he's been excommunicated, he no longer has protection, not even at the Hotel Continental, where Winston or Ian McShane is waiting for him, always perfect with his goofy grin. villain and which we will also find in 2025 Ballerina.
So in this third film John Wick basically just has to run. He rides a horse, he rides a motorcycle, he runs fast from Chinatown to the Manhattan Bridge. The title is not a home title: Parabellum it means a specific thing and is a rhyme to a Latin saying that encompasses the meaning of the films: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” That is to say: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Almost the highest praise for the physicality of cinema, the extreme expression of action without words and without music. In here there are – as always – fights, shots, blows orchestrated as if they were ballets, where only one of the two (or more) partners remains standing. Obviously, John Wick resists everything, it goes without saying, otherwise it wouldn't be John Wick and otherwise the franchise would have ended here in 2019.
Driven by the blind rage of seeking justice for his wife, for the '69 Mustang, for what «no, it wasn't just a dog». Therefore, if music and words are absent and superfluous, in Parabellum an absurd comedy is staged which, madness after madness, we cannot do without. If the characters who enter John's sights are the outline of a bigger picture, the frames on which they play are absolute protagonists: after Rome, here is Casablanca, where John, on the run, will be helped by Sofia (Halle Berry) and the his two bestial (but adorable) guard dogs.
Almost as if to suggest that the violent city we know in the 1980s is still there, ready to make its way, to return to the surface, mixing with the crowd of Grand Central Station and suggestions of the Joker (which is from 2019, like this film). Moreover, in the saga of Stahelski – who was not surprisingly a martial artist before dedicating himself to cinema – there is no clear boundary between good and bad, yet it is easy to see, amidst the blood, knives and heavy calibers , a sensation highlighted between justice and mistakes. That cannot be forgiven. Because John Wick, melancholy and lethal, is back and will return in 2025 when (obviously) he will also appear in Ballerina. And curiosity increases…
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