[COLUMN] What Ballerina Tells Us About the Modern Child Abduction Thriller | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece discusses Ballerina, the latest entry in the John Wick franchise. It’s… fine. The film feels largely stitched together, particularly around its use of John Wick as played by Keanu Reeves, and is certainly the weakest entry in the franchise. At the same time, that’s a pretty high floor. The film hangs together better than it should, and features a few cool concepts and action beats. If you want to check it out, please feel free to bookmark and check it out. We won’t be dancing around spoilers.

There is a certain elegance to the original John Wick. Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen) steals a car belonging to retired assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves), and in doing so kills the dog that was left to John by his recently deceased wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan). The murder of a dog is a very simple way of establishing emotional stakes, ensuring that the audience will be entirely aligned with John on his rip roaring rampage of revenge. Anything that John does in the wake of the dog’s death is justifiable.

Ballerina understands this. Indeed, the spin-off reintroduces John Wick in scenes lifted from John Wick: Chapter III – Parabellum, this time from the perspective of trainee assassin Eve Maccaro (Ana de Armas), who watches from a distance and listens from behind doors. As John seeks shelter from his adversaries with the Ruska Roma, the Director (Anjelica Huston) reiterates those very basic emotional stakes from the franchise’s first film, lamenting, “All of this over a puppy?”

It seems like Ballerina was taking notes. If killing a dog is an easy way to engender audience sympathy, to make the viewer root for an unstoppable killing machine, then Ballerina adopts the next best approach. The franchise’s first theatrical spin-off, following the miniseries The Continental, leans heavily on the threat of violence against children. Ballerina is a story about kidnapped and traumatized children, its killer-for-hire framed as a savior of lost children.

Indeed, the film introduces Eve as a child (Victoria Comte), whose father Javier (David Castañeda) tries to protect her from the mysterious “cult” to which her deceased mother belonged. The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), the head of that cult, hunts the father and daughter down. His men kill Javier, leaving Eve a child who finds herself in the custody of Winston Scott (Ian McShane), who passes her along to the Director, who trains her as a bodyguard-slash-assassin.

This is more than just an origin story. As an adult, Eve plans to hunt down the men who murdered her father. She crosses paths with Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus), a former member of the Chancellor’s cult, who is trying to escape with his daughter Ella (Ava McCarthy). Ella is also the Chancellor’s granddaughter. During a confrontation in Prague, Daniel is seriously wounded and Ella is abducted. Eve’s revenge rampage transforms into a rescue mission, as she tries to save Ella.

None of this is especially innovative. Putting children in danger is a great way to escalate the stakes in a film or television show. Children are inherently innocent and vulnerable characters, often unable to protect themselves. It is very easy to root for a protagonist who is seeking to protect or save a child, as this is an inherently selfless act. It is also something universal, arguably a biological impulse wired into the human brain. Done well, it can give these narratives a real weight.

It is something that movies have long understood, even if it is also something that needs to be done tastefully. In Jaws, the death of a child (Jeffrey Voorhees) serves as the emotional pivot of the movie, with the version in the film much less graphic than one considered alternative. In Assault on Precinct 13, director John Carpenter would later acknowledge that he regretted the way that he shot the death of a child (Kim Richards).

There was a wave of dramas, thrillers and horror movies about the abduction and threatening of children during the 1990s, films as varied in tone as The Green Mile, Hook, Rush Hour, Ransom, The People Under the Stairs and The Gingerbread Man. These seemed to exist in the context of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children such as Jaycee Dugard or JonBenét Ramsay, the aftershocks of the Satanic Ritual Abuse scandals and public anxiety over “stranger danger.”

It feels like this anxiety concerning children has returned in a wave of recent films, often focused on child abduction and trafficking. In Rambo: Last Blood, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) travels to Mexico to save young Gabriela Beltran (Yvette Monreal) from the Mexican cartels. In the surprise hit Sound of Freedom, Homeland Security Agent Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel) goes rogue to save children from human traffickers around the globe.

Earlier this year, David Ayer’s A Working Man depicted widowed father Levon Cade (Jason Statham), who is hired by his friends Joe (Michael Peña) and Carla (Noemi Gonzalez) to save their daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) from ruthless child traffickers led by Wolodymyr "Wolo" Kolisnyk (Jason Flemyng). Whether coincidentally or not, A Working Man was co-written by Last Blood co-writer and star Sylvester Stallone.

Similarly, The Accountant 2 finds Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) reuniting with his estranged brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal) to rescue a bunch of kidnapped children from a prison camp in Juarez. The film builds to a climax in which Christian literally ferries a yellow school bus full of rescued children back to America, stopping only so Braxton can rescue a cat from the side of the road. There is clearly something in the air.

Ballerina exists within this framework. The world of John Wick is populated by assassins and murderers, but the Chancellor is understood to be an exceptionally vile and monstrous adversary even within that framework. When Eve asks Winston about the Chancellor’s group, he makes it clear that they exist outside the boundaries of the established underworld, unlike the other “tribes.” Arms dealer Frank (Abraham Popoola) tries to avoid knowing anything more about them than he has to.

The Chancellor is obsessed with children – particularly girls. His soldiers track them down and try to steal them from their parents, so that they might be taken away to the secret township that the Chancellor operates in Hallstatt, Austria. On the surface, Ballerina feels of a piece with recent movies like Last Blood, Sound of Freedom, A Working Man and The Accountant 2, a movie about a single heroic soldier trying to rescue kidnapped children from a foreign land.

Just like those 1990s movies about child abduction, these recent films exist in a broader context. While some of this is undoubted the moral clarity of pitting violent characters against the worst people on Earth, this trend is clearly in conversation with contemporary conspiracy theories about child kidnapping and trafficking like QAnon or “Pizzagate”, which many experts understand as an extension of the Satanic Panic of the 1990s.

There is a strong reactionary subtext to most of these movies, tales of foreigners kidnapping and abducting American children, often taking them across the border into lawless territory. After all, these movies were released in the shadow of inflammatory rhetoric from President Donald Trump accusing Mexican immigrants of “bringing crime” and being “rapists.” Peter Bradshaw called out the “Trumpian fantasies of Mexican rapists and hilariously insecure US border” in Last Blood.

However, statistically speaking, these fears about foreigners abducting and abusing children often serve as a distraction from the real threat. Tragically, most children who suffer abuse are victimized by a family member. The majority of abducted children aren’t taken by mysterious foreigners or child traffickers, but instead kidnapped by a relative. It is more comfortable to imagine that children are targeted by opportunistic strangers, but that is a comparatively rare occurrence.

In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that many of these reactionary conspiracy theories are perpetuated by figures accused of such misconduct. The real Tim Ballard, the inspiration for Sound of Freedom, has been accused of being a sexual predator and of human trafficking. Representative Matt Gaetz, who openly supported champions of the QAnon conspiracy theory, was investigated for sex trafficking a minor. Sadly, these threats are often closer to home than these fantasies allow.

This is part of what makes Ballerina so interesting. In contrast to Last Blood, Sound of Freedom, A Working Man and The Accountant 2, the film understands that the threat to these children often comes from inside the family unit. The Chancellor is not some stranger kidnapping random children. Eve’s mother belonged to his cult, and so he claims ownership of Eve and her sister Lena (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Ella is the Chancellor’s biological granddaughter, so he feels ownership of her.

Despite the fact that the Chancellor and his followers operate outside the underworld structures of the John Wick universe, they are never presented as foreign or subversive. They don’t seem particularly interested in anything outside their own insular world. For a “cult”, they are decidedly hostile to “outsiders.” The Chancellor doesn’t lock his captives in cages or dungeons; when his followers capture Eve, they secure her inside a school.

While the assassins of John Wick operate just beneath the surface of the regular world, engaged in pitched battles around the oblivious civilians of New York, the Chancellor is Hallstatt. While cops like James Hendrix (Thomas Sadoski) turn a blind eye to John Wick, the cops of Hallstatt actively work for the Chancellor. While Winston solicits information from an underground network, the Chancellor addresses the citizens of Hallstatt through speakers lining the streets.

The Chancellor does not exist outside the system, the Chancellor is the system. Indeed, in his final monologue to Eve in the town square, the Chancellor argues that Eve is fighting against a system that has been in place for thousands of years. This is very interesting in both the larger context of the John Wick franchise, which is largely about how systems are inherently rigged against the powerless, and in the specific context of this wave of movies about child abduction and trafficking.

Ballerina is a deeply imperfect movie, one that feels like it was heavily cut together even if there issome debate abouthow extensively it was reworked in reshoots and postproduction. Still, the film is surprisingly canny in its handling of one of the most popular and zeitgeisty themes of this particular moment. Moving gracefully, Ballerina avoids the reactionary pitfalls of many of its contemporaries. When it comes to dealing with kidnapped children, Ballerina is not kidding around.