Producers: Leonora Darby, James Harris and Mark Lane   Director: John Maclean   Screenplay: John Maclean   Cast: Kōki (Mitsuki Kimura), Tim Roth, Jack Lowden, Takehiro Hira, Rory McCann, Raphaël Thiéry, Alex Macqueen, Jack Morris, Dennis Okwera, Jamie Michie, Bryan Mills, Ian Hanmore, Douglas Russell, Sammy Heyman, Joanne Whalley and Nathan Malone   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: C

Scottish writer-director John Maclean, whose first feature was the aptly titled “Slow West” (2015), a beautifully filmed but languid tale of death on the American prairie in the late nineteenth century, again joins forces with cinematographer Robbie Ryan to craft a visually evocative period piece, another study of a violent society this time set in the rural Britain of 1790.  Like the previous film “Tornado” is a deliberately paced story punctuated by bursts of brutal action, gorgeous to look at but dramatically rather thin.

Like “Slow West” it’s also a chase film, beginning with the frantic pursuit of a young Japanese girl—the titular heroine, played by model and songwriter Kōki—by a band of bandits headed by the ruthless Sugarman (Tim Roth) and including his son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden) and a group of thugs with nicknames like Kitten (Roy McCann), Archer (Jamie Michie), Squid Lips (Jack Morris), Lazy Legs (Douglas Russell) and Psycho (Dennis Okwera).  Tornado is also being trailed by a young boy (Nathan Malone), a thief himself.  The two break into the house of an aristocrat (Alex Macqueen), which Sugarman and his crew trash searching for her in a sequence that blends suspense, nastiness and some bleak humor.

The reason behind all this is revealed later in flashbacks—Maclean’s script loves chronological shifts.  Tornado and her rigid father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) were touring the countryside giving puppet shows for the locals, in which their marionette samurai fought duels with swords that ended with them coming from behind the curtain to close with a battle they staged between themselves.  During a performance Tornado noticed the boy stealing two bags that Sugarman’s men had put down while watching the show, so she took them from the kid and stored them in the undercarriage of the horse-drawn wagon that served as their mobile home and theatre: the bags contained gold coins, the gang’s recent loot.

Unfortunately, Sugarman’s band caught up with them, and Fujin was killed in the ensuing confrontation, though he managed to wound Sugarman before expiring.  Tornado fled, the boy following her, and the gang pursuing them both after failing to find the bags in the wagon.  There’s a wrinkle here, however: Little Sugar, tired of taking orders from his father, plans to take the gold himself, which requires him to catch Tornado first and force her to admit where she’d hidden the stash.

The pursuit leads Tornado to seek shelter with Mint (Raphaël Thiéry), the strongman in the travelling circus run by Vienna Crawford (Joanne Whalley) in which she and her father had previously been players.  But Sugarman and his crew follow her there and terrorize the troupe.  Again the girl escapes, returning to the wagon to bury her father and find the gold.  Meanwhile Sugarman and Little Sugar have had a face-off that turns deadly.

Now the hunted becomes the hunter as Tornado seeks vengeance on Sugarman and his crew.  One by one she takes on the men who lie in wait for her.  The outcome is predictable, and the staging of the individual clashes surprisingly unimaginative. 

With “Tornado” Maclean demonstrates again that he has a distinctive voice and that, working with Ryan and his other craft collaborators—production designer Elizabeth El-Kadhi, costumer Kirsty Halliday, editors Ryan Morrison and Selina Macarthur, composer Jed Kurzel—he can evoke a world palpably different from ours.  Yet that world has an artificial feel, and the people inhabiting in it equally so.  Partially that’s because they’re thinly written, more sketches than rounded characters.  But it also results from the fact that the acting is, for the most part, pretty rudimentary, even from veterans like Roth and Lowden but more noticeably in the supporting cast.

And Kōki is a special case.  She certainly looks the part, and there are moments when she connects emotionally.  But too often her performance seems halting and uncertain, as if Maclean were directing her as Hitchcock is reputed to have directed Kim Novak in “Vertigo,” trying to control every gesture and movement.  The result is a turn that’s at times affecting, but only sporadically convincing. Her last-act swordsmanship is at best adequate.

In the end “Tornado” is, like “Slow West,” impressive in spurts but odd and ultimately unsatisfying as a whole.    

Producers: Gavin Brivik and James Newberry   Director: Len Wiseman   Screenplay: Shay Hatten  Cast: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Norman Reedus, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Victoria Comte, David Castañeda, Ava McCarthy, Abraham Popoola, Magdalena Sittova, Sooyoung Choi, Juliet Doherty, Marc Cram and Robert Maaser    Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

These days it’s virtually axiomatic that any successful action movie will metastasize, and “John Wick” certainly has.  Since its debut in 2014 the movie has spawned three direct sequels, a comic book prequel series “The Book of Rules” and a spin-off streaming series, “The Continental.”  “Ballerina” is the first feature spin-off, equipped with the pre-title “From the World of John Wick,” presumably to assure devotees that they weren’t going to be exposed to some arty ballet film.  (As it turns out, “Swan Lake”—which seems the only ballet Hollywood moviemakers are aware of, apart from “The Nutcracker,” though the latter might be appropriate given the number of groin kicks the heroine applies to her male opponents—is the sole ballet alluded to here, and then only in brief snippets.)  It also includes appearances by some “Wick” veterans, including the man himself: it could, it fact, be the first in a multitude of installments focusing on other hit-people with whom he came in contact during his long career.

The protagonist in this case is Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), who, as a child (Victoria Comte), witnessed her beloved father Javier (David Castañeda) killed by a squad of thugs led by a dark figure later revealed as The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne).  Orphaned Eve is befriended by Winston Scott (Ian McShane), who takes her to the ballet school run by The Director (Anjelica Huston) of Wick’s Ruska Roma crime clan; and though Eve doesn’t excel at dance, she proves formidable in the school’s other curriculum in assassination, where Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) proves a most perceptive mentor in drumming into her that while she might not be able to go toe-to-toe with brutish men physically, there are other ways for young ladies to win.

And fight she must, first as a bodyguard to a young woman being threatened by a criminal gang.  But in performing her duties, the memory of her father’s death is triggered by a tattoo of an “X” on one of the villains she kills.  She learns that the tattoo signifies membership in The Chancellor’s cult, a group that kills for pleasure as much as cash, with which Ruska Roma has long maintained a modus vivendi.  Despite admonitions from The Director and Winston, Eve is determined to track down The Chancellor and take her revenge. 

The search takes her to a hotel in Prague that’s part of the Continental universe, where she breaks into the suite of Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus), who has a bounty on his head from The Chancellor not just for leaving the cult but taking his daughter Ella (Ava McCarthy)—The Chancellor’s granddaughter—with him.  When The Chancellor’s squad, led by a sinister, black-garbed woman named Lena (Catalina Sandino Moreno) invades the suite, Eve assists Pine against them, seeing Javier in Daniel and herself in Ella.  In the ensuing melee Pine is wounded and Ella abducted.

Eve has now gone rogue, and a bounty is put on her head.  But that doesn’t deter her from following the trail to Hallstatt, a snowy mountain town in Austria where all the inhabitants constitute a fighting force loyal to The Chancellor.  Eve must fight not only them, but a Ruska Roma heavyweight sent in to restore the uneasy truce with The Chancellor by liquidating her.

This second half of the film is just an endless series of battles against an apparently limitless array of enemies.  Except for the locale, however, it represents little change from the earlier part of the picture, which began with the protracted sequence of Javier fighting off The Chancellor’s men and continued through Eve’s initiation mission, the mayhem in Prague and an assault on a munitions shop run by a helpful guy named Frank (Abraham Popoola) where she stopped to pick up weaponry for her trip to Hallstatt.  The problem with these fight sequences is that while they’re all reasonably well choreographed by director Len Wiseman and his team and competently shot by cinematographer Romain Lacourbas, and possess some momentary bits of humor, they’re basically conventional from a visual perspective; apart from the initiation fight, set in a glitzy nightclub, they lack the psychedelically colorful pizzazz of the action sequences in the “Wick” movies.

The same observation applies to the virtually non-stop battles in Hallstaat. A couple of them show some flair—a confrontation with a variety of attackers in a café/souvenir shop and the capper, a duel with flame throwers and hoses against The Chancellor’s chief henchman Dex (Robert Maaser).  Both go on far too long, though, with editors Nicholas Lundgren and Jason Ballantine allowing them to drag on mercilessly, and even the mano-a-mano with the dude from Ruska Roma, though agreeably short, lacks any real distinction.  There’s also an “Empire Strikes Back” sort of revelation toward the close, but it amounts to a limp little blip.  The flamethrower episode probably holds a cinematic record, however, for the most people shown being incinerated; if only Smell-O-Vision were still around, the theatre could be filled with the odor of burning flesh for fifteen minutes or so.

Of course the action sequences in the “John Wick” movies were very long too, but those pictures were enlivened by Reeves’s characteristically zonked-out demeanor.  De Armas handles the physical demands of her role well (she and her stand-ins, that is), but she really doesn’t bring much to the party beyond a look of steely determination, and that gets rather tiresome over the course of two long hours.  The presence of familiar faces—Reeves, Huston, McShane and Reddick—can only do so much, and for the most part the new characters—Lena and Pine in particular—aren’t very interesting, and neither Sandino Moreno nor Reedus can do much with them.  But Popoola, as the put-upon weapons dealer, Magdalena Sittova, as a militant waitress in the Hallstaat café, and Marc Cram, as the exasperated manager of the Prague hotel, all offer welcome, if fleeting, moments of wry humor.  Byrne, on the other hand, can do little with the one-note part of the gloomy, vampiric Chancellor. 

“Ballerina” has been afforded a generally top-notch look.  Production designer Philip Ivey gives everything a niftily artificial appearance, especially in the Hallstatt section, and Lacourbas endows his work, and the costumes by Tina Kalivas, with a glossy glow.  One has to put up, however, with an exceptionally irritating synthesizer score by Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard, which pounds on remorselessly throughout; it’s really a relief when a snatch of Tchaikovsky pops in occasionally.

Though bloated and unrelenting, “Ballerina” will undoubtedly do big business on the basis of the Wick connection, and probably spawn sequels of its own.  But apart from the change of protagonist it never manages to develop a profile of its own that would help it stand out from the previous pictures in the franchise, and in most respects it’s inferior to them.