Action thrillers stop short of scoring a hit

For action thriller fans, there's little quite as satisfying as a tightly constructed narrative that boasts some acrobatic stunts and white-knuckle car chases. Very often those narratives can be elegantly spare, flying in the face of what genre fans have come to expect, as Chad Stahelski proved with John Wick, and Kim Jee-woon did with The Last Stand. In the former, a retired assassin goes on a revenge streak after some thugs kill his dog. In the latter, a border-town sheriff tries to protect his community from escaped prisoners.

Elegance is also the reason an action thriller can be quite disappointing. Such is the case with Len Wiseman's From the World of John Wick: Ballerina and Zhang Qi's Trapped.

In Ballerina, Ana de Armas (Knives Out) plays Eve Macarro — orphaned as a child by a cult leader, the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne); rescued by the godfather of a secret hitman's society and trained in the ways of ballet and murder for hire by John Wick's mysterious boss, the Director (Anjelica Huston). When Eve discovers the Chancellor's identity, she sets out for revenge. Ballerina reverts to the world-building of the John Wick franchise — it takes place in the middle of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and starts Eve from zero so that we can watch her assassination skills blossom as well as her personal catharsis.

Bai Ke (or White-K, Detective Chinatown 1900) plays Xia Ran in Trapped, a cop and former soldier with a squad of two subordinates — one close to retirement, the other a green rookie — hiding from the world in a tiny desert town where Mandarin, Tibetan and Mongolian are spoken in equal measure. It's a remote location and the perfect spot in which gang boss Beishan (Xin Baiqing, The Eight Hundred) can hide a stash of money and valuables. When he and his underlings descend on the town to collect their hidden treasure, it's up to the largely unarmed Xia to protect the remaining residents from the thugs as well as a looming sandstorm.

Both films fall just a bit short of achieving their goals. Ballerina has been waiting in the wings for years to capitalize on the popularity of the franchise and expand the John Wick universe. The problem is that the wait — necessitating the reshoots and re-edits and the late addition of Stahelski's singular touch — shows in the film we've finally got. Ballerina's lumbering first act meanders and dithers with a B-plot that feels like it was supposed to be the A-plot until Stahelski, who is also a producer on the film, remedies the stronger third act with more creative stunts and fight sequences and a tone more in line with the franchise. The fatal error, however, is in underwriting Eve and then falling on the crutch of a distracting appearance by John Wick (Keanu Reeves). Eve's character is diluted and we barely get to know her.

For Zhang and writer Sun Yue, it's a case of reach exceeding grasp. Trapped starts strong, setting up a vivid space and a neo-Western tone that organically ratchets up the tension within the gang and commits the story to its nihilistic undercurrents. It's all complemented by Wang Jiehong's bleak-beautiful cinematography, peaking with the long-threatened sandstorm. There are stakes and consequences for these characters, but the film starts spinning its wheels once it dispenses with the obstacles to Xia's and Beishan's inevitable showdown. Nonetheless it's more gratifying than the one between Eve and the Chancellor.

Trapped has too many endings - the result of threads that could easily have been snipped for a tighter final product with more bite, but as thrillers go, it's the one to beat this week.