In Review: 'The Life of Chuck,' 'Ballerina'
Two films from the worlds of Stephen King and John Wick deliver on their brands.
The Life of Chuck
Dir. Mike Flanagan
110 min.
From Marty’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) perspective, things aren’t looking so good, either for himself or the Earth in general. Hardly anyone shows up to the high school English class he teaches anymore, and why should they? The news is filled with one catastrophe after another and every time the internet blinks out, it feels like it could be the last. (As one dad laments in a parent/teacher conference, even Pornhub has disappeared.) Marty’s still friendly with his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse who lives across town, but she has her own set of problems as her hospital’s skeleton crew tends to an alarming spike in suicides. Life carries on as best it can as the end of the world looms on the horizon, but how much longer can that last? The only person who seems to be having a moment is Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), whose smiling face adorns billboards and other spaces across town congratulating him on “39 Great Years!”
Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, The Life of Chuck adapts a 2020 Stephen King short story of the same name and stays close to its unusual structure. The film is divided into three acts presented in reverse chronological order. The opening act (which is also, in ways that will only become clear later, the last) often feels chillingly of-the-moment. In one memorable scene, Marty and his neighbor Gus (Matthew Lillard) work through a list of losses as the world falls apart and places and institutions that seemed destined to last forever crumble and disappear. It’s terrifying but what can they do about it?
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But the seeming end of the world is not the end of the movie. The Rod Serling-like inflections in Nick Offerman’s narration point to The Twilight Zone as an influence. And as chilling as The Life of Chuck’s opening act often is, the film taps into the sentimental streak that runs through that series and through much of King’s work, too. It would be a disservice to reveal too much more about the second and third (or, more accurately, second and first) acts of The Life of Chuck beyond saying the film’s middle section focuses on Chuck as an adult and the third on his childhood. Also, both revolve around dance sequences (choreographed by Mandy Moore) performed with great enthusiasm and technical skill that still feel like spontaneous expressions of the characters performing them. The third part is a ghost story, sort of, concerning a forbidden room in the home of Chuck’s grandparents (played by Mia Sara and a bewhiskered Mark Hamill.) If that sounds like a peculiar structure for a movie, it is, even if The Life of Chuck ends up providing odd packaging for some decidedly square philosophizing about the preciousness of life that never quite matches the intensity of its opening stretch.
That said, it’s also an undeniably moving film, familiar sentiments and all. Other directors have made better King adaptations (though this one should join the top ten of any King ranking), but none have made adaptations as locked into King’s particular voice as Flanagan, as evidenced by Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep and deeply King-influenced efforts like the miniseries Midnight Mass. The uncanny intrudes on everyday life to sometimes unsettling, sometimes persuasively corny effect. Much of Chuck’s dialogue (and narration) comes directly from the page. Flanagan fills out the rest with the winding monologues that have become his trademark, delivered with assurance by what’s become a reliable and expanding stock company. (Everyone’s good, but Hamill and Carl Lumbly are particular standouts in the supporting cast here.) The Life of Chuck begins with a cataclysm that’s cosmic in scale. It ends in a much smaller, quieter place, yet somehow the film brings it all full circle anyway. —Keith Phipps
The Life of Chuck opens in theaters tonight. (Unless it opened years ago or will open at some point in the future.)
Ballerina
Dir. Len Wiseman
125 min.
The new John Wick spinoff Ballerina takes place between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4. Before you go scrambling to figure out why that timeline is significant and what you might need to remember going into the new film, let me reassure you: That fact is completely meaningless. There are familiar faces from the franchise that surface in Ballerina, including Keanu Reeves as Wick and Ian McShane and the late Lance Reddick as the operators of the Continental Hotel, a safe space for professional assassins. (The underworld of John Wick is like a game of tag that never ends, with the Continental as a home base.) You don’t need to know much of anything going in. For a franchise built wholly on the strength of beautiful action setpieces, such mythology is dead weight.
If anything, the most relevant background information for Ballerina might come from watching the James Bond movie No Time to Die, which featured Ana de Armas as a CIA agent who elegantly sluiced her way through gunmen in a black cocktail dress. With that proof of concept in hand, Ballerina casts her in the stock role of a Wick-style revenge-seeker who’s brought into the life of an elite assassin and tries to shoot her way out. There’s nothing complicated about her mission and nothing terribly imaginative, either, in bringing on Len Wiseman for the first Wick movie not directed by stuntman-turned-action-maestro Chad Stahelski, who was brought in anyway for extensive reshoots. The logic seems to be that Wiseman made a star out of a slinky Kate Beckinsale in the lousy Underworld movies, so he’d be a natural to do likewise for de Armas. Such lizard-brain thinking isn’t as damaging to this series as it sounds, even if Wiseman is an uninspired choice.
De Armas stars as Eve Macarro, introduced as a small child who witnesses her father’s death at the hands of trained assassins. Eve’s dad tried to wriggle free from a cult-like sect of fellow assassins, led by the nefarious Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, having the time of his life), but its reach proved too immense for him to escape. As an orphan, Eve is brought into the house of the Ruska Roma, led by a not-so-motherly Director (Anjelica Huston) who trains women in ballet and martial arts. She graduates into a career as a killer, but doesn’t let loyalty to her employers keep her from pursuing the Chancellor, even if that means running afoul of the Ruska Roma and the rules of the Continental.
It takes a while for Ballerina to find its footing, because Eve has to grow into her potential through the grind of training, which here resembles an airless Black Swan. The quick-start efficiency of John Wick avenging his dog in the first film is missing here, replaced by a lot of lugubrious business about honor codes and underground sects. De Armas is asked to carry herself with a seriousness of purpose that saps some pleasure out of the film without adding the world-weary gravitas that Reeves brings to the table. But then the switch flips. Once Ballerina sets Eve off to a snowy Bavarian village to confront the Final Boss, it suddenly levels up to the high standard of the best John Wick movies, treating the last half hour as one gigantic set piece that keeps paying off. The best approach to the film is to be like Eve: Just be patient and grind through those stretches where you’re stuck in the mud. You’ll get your satisfaction. — Scott Tobias
Ballerina tiny-dances its way into theaters everywhere today.
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