In short: Ballerina (2022)

Original title: 발레리나

Our protagonist Ok-joo (Jeon Jong-seo) has a background in the security business Ballerina never really explains but that provides her with all kind of badass abilities. Apart from her close friendship with ballerina/cake shop seller Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), she seems to be virtually friendless, a loner by inclination. One might suspect a traumatic past, what with this being an action movie made in the 21st Century, but the film is never showing us one.

Ok-joo does acquire some acute trauma in any case when she finds Min-hee dead of suicide. Min-hee left a note in which she asks Ok-joo to avenge her, complete with a mildly cryptic hint about what the hell she means with that. Soon, Ok-joo is on the trail of mass rapist, killer, and all-around shitheel Choi (Kim Ji-hoon), who raped and enslaved Min-hee, causing her suicide.

Under normal circumstances, killing Choi would be about an evening's work for Ok-joo, but it turns out he’s just part of a large drug, forced prostitution and murder racket, which makes things rather more difficult for her.

Lee Chung-hyun’s Ballerina is a nice little action movie, with some post-John Wick style gun fu, moments of absurd humour that seem to pop in from a different world than the rest of the film, and the attitude to genre tropes we know and love from South Korean genre cinema: tropes are excellent things, fun and really rather useful, but when the mood strikes, they are also optional.

There’s no large restructuring of the elements of the revenge flick here. Lee’s clearly trying to make an effective example of the form right in the mainstream of the cinematic language of our time for such a thing, just one that from time to time likes to turn things a couple degrees away from the completely straight and narrow, which keeps affairs more lively.

Colour schemes, camera work and editing scream POP! so much I’m pretty sure this is going to be a movie we’ll be able to read as a platonic ideal of how action filmmaking in the 2020s looked when we’re ten, fifteen years in the future. It’s certainly a fun example of its form and style, and though it doesn’t exactly have more substance than is strictly necessary for it to function, it still is a fine time.