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Do You Need A Plot When You Have A Flamethrower?

there are many ways to tell a story

brian grubb

10 Jun 2025 — 5 min read

The plot of Ballerina — I’m sorry, From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina — goes something like this: a man with a prominent scar inflicts life-altering trauma on a child and then that child runs away and settles in with some hooligans and then the child grows up and decides to seek vengeance against the scar-covered villain. This is, if we want to play fast and loose with things, almost exactly the plot of The Lion King. Ballerina has less singing, though. And more flamethrowers. Also, the role of Simba is now played by Ana de Armas, who spends a not-insignificant chunk of the movie whomping large men in the beans. So, some small changes.

I use the word “plot” up there loosely, for the record. There really is very little in the way of story here. Are the scar-covered bad guys in a cult that murders people? Of course. Do we learn any real sense of their motivation for doing so? Not really. Do they all live in a small snow-covered village in the mountains with a location so secret it is only ever explained in vague terms and broad gestures toward sections of a map? You know it. Does Ana de Armas somehow discover the location of this town immediately anyway and begin dismantling it brick by brick? Brother, you know she does.

And, like, fine. Great! The movie is a blast, a slow-ish 30-40 minutes followed by an hour of almost wall-to-wall action, all of it choreographed in the classic John Wick style and creative in a way that the best action movies are. I am absolutely not joking about the flamethrowers. That was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in any movie in a long time. They teased it way back when the trailer was released, at which point I made this GIF of Ana de Armas and a murderous goon engaged in a standoff where his stream of flames is defeated because she blasts a fire hose into it. I knew it was coming and I still hooted when I saw it. I suspect you will, too.

This, to me, is cinema, and it helps to support a position I have held for a long time: Action movies really do not need a coherent plot to be a good time. Ballerina is the second movie I’ve seen in the theater this summer that I enjoyed immensely despite not really knowing or caring exactly what was going on or why it was happening. If you show me someone who claims to understand why Tom Cruise needed to dangle from an airplane to defeat an all-knowing blob of AI that was hellbent on starting nuclear war, I’ll show you someone who spent way too much time thinking about a movie where Tom Cruise dangled from an airplane.

(I’ll accept the argument that it can apply to comedy, too. Anchorman is not so much a movie as it is a two-hour avalanche of bits. I wouldn’t change a frame of it.)

To be clear, only because I can feel some of you getting ready to yell at me, movies can have both action and plots. There are lots of them that do, and some of them are very good. The Dark Knight movies had a plot and killer action scenes. Gladiator, too. And Master and Commander. Most movies that star Russell Crowe do, now that I think about it.

My point is that these movies don’t need much of a plot if the action is strong enough. Sometimes trying to jam a plot into them just makes them longer and worse. I do not need or want 20 minutes of backstory to humanize the villain you are going to kill off at the end of the movie anyway. I’m happy to accept that he’s evil and rotten to the core and must be destroyed if that’s all we’re here for. Put him in a black overcoat if it helps. I can work with that.

In another movie, one that is not stuffed to the gills with frenetic bursts of flamethrowing and plane-dangling and bean-whomping, one that relies on things like dialogue and character depth and a linear story that isn’t as filled with holes as that evil villain with an empty soul is about to be, then yes. Build that plot. Explain things to me. Give me something to think about it. I love that, too, when that’s what I’m looking for.

But, hey, it’s also okay to just have flamethrowers.

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— yes, I read the interview with the guy behind the John Wick movies

— I don’t particularly love the song but I must give Sabrina Carpenter — from Quakertown, Go Birds — credit for making a music video so goofy and untethered to reality that it made me pause it like 20 times to figure out what was going on

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— our long national nightmare is over (or at least the one about Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins)

— good

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— also speaking of baseball… holy crap

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