KEEP ON GUNNING

A pirouette through John Wick lore

- ROBERT ITO

Early in the 2019 film John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabel-lum, our hero enters what may be the world’s most peculiar dance studio.

Part ballet academy, part dojo, the expansive space is also the Manhattan headquarters of the Ruska Roma, a Russian crime syndicate that first took in Wick when he was just a boy and taught him to kill. Onstage, a lithe danseuse is ordered by her instructor to perform pirouette after exhausting pirouette till she drops.

In From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina (now in Thai cinemas), this small glimpse of the school is expanded tenfold. That spinning dancer, Eve, played by Ana De Armas, is now the star of the show. Over the course of the film, we get a closer look at the canvas of tattoos on her back and learn how she came to get them. We find out about the school’s traditions and initiations, as well as the Russian myths and legends that shape its mission.

Since this is a Wick film, we also get to watch Eve take out fearsome fighters with pots and pans, swords and knives, grenades and ice skates and flame throwers and car doors. There's a lot to see. But with all that inventive mayhem going on, do viewers really need to know that, say, Eve's spirit animal is the kikimora, a haglike creature from Slavic mythology?

For lovers of the franchise, the answer is a resounding yes, please. In online chats, fans debate such minutiae as exactly who is in the Ruska Roma (is Winston, the owner of the New York Continental Hotel, secretly a member?), while scholars debate the franchise’s folklore and economic systems in books like The Worlds Of John Wick: The Year's Work At The Continental Hotel.

“When we made the first Wick movie, we thought we were just making these background rules,” said Basil Iwanyk, one of the producers of Ballerina. “We had no idea the lore would become one of the above-the-title stars of the movies.”