Attack of the Killer Babes!

Summer Blockbuster Edition Part 3 – how female hitmen took over Hollywood

Note to readers: NFL training camps just opened, meaning the football artificial universe – and Tuesday Morning Quarterback – are close at hand.

The action flick Ballerina is a summertime hit. Sorry -- formal name From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. In 2020 Will Ferrell tried to finish off the wordy movie title with Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. But the wordy movie title lives on.

In Ballerina, a woman played by the gorgeous Ana de Armas kills perhaps two hundred people using guns, daggers, swords, flamethrowers, hand grenades and ice skates. At one point the death weapon is a dinner plate.

The de Armas character walks through elegant ballroom parties, chateaus of the super-rich, secret headquarters of crime syndicates and scenic resort towns killing everyone in sight, usually with bullets to the head from a gun she snatched out of someone’s hand. Thousands of rounds fired at her at close range miss. None of her victims ever ducks. She is stabbed, shot and beaten, yet recovers in seconds without medical attention.

In the film the distinguished Anjelica Huston, an Oscar winner, plays “the leader of a New York-based organization of ballerina assassins.” Watch out for those ballerina assassins! The accomplished Irish actor Gabriel Byrne is “the leader of a dangerous cult of assassins based in the Austrian Alps.” Are there assassins who are not dangerous?

Sadistic ballerinas also appear in the 2023 South Korean action flick also called Ballerina, also in which a lovely young classically trained dancer walks around blowing people’s brains out.

In the scenic Austrian Alps village of the new Ballerina, everyone is a hired killer. Masked assassins with carbines pop out from behind every door. Ana de Armas kills them all, since they never take cover -- or aim at her before shooting. In a restaurant the matronly sous chef is a hired killer. Watch out for that dinner plate!

This is the world of John Wick, who has a cameo, and whose four movies represent one of Hollywood’s top moneymakers of the past decade. In this reality a hired killer can walk through a party shooting dozens of people in the head, can walk down a Manhattan street shooting Lyft drivers and newsstand hawkers, walk through the New York City subways shooting commuters: No one takes cover.

The primary commonality between John Wick flicks and Ballerina – no police ever come. There are no consequences to gunning people down in public.