Jonah Naplan June 4, 2025
By the time John Wick shows up to kick ass in “Ballerina,” director Len Wiseman and his star Ana de Armas have already presented to us an impressive spectacle of stylized bloodshed instantly comparable to its franchise brethren. His arrival feels narratively redundant. Armas’s Eve Macarro clearly doesn’t need Wick’s help at that point, so the cameo feels like fan service more than anything else. I suspected he’d only play a minor role, but that assumption was incorrect. He’s one of the best parts of a movie that is stellar in action choreography but dances around grounding its lead actress.
It takes place before “John Wick: Chapter 4” but after “John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum” (franchise fans may even recall specific scenes from the latter movie that directly parallel moments in this one), as up-and-coming assassin Eve Macarro (Armas) embarks on a globe-spanning manhunt to track down and kill the people who murdered her father when she was just a child. It was after this traumatic event that Winston (Ian McShane) put the young Eve into the care of the Ruska Roma, headed by the Director (Anjelica Huston), the same place where John Wick himself developed his skills. She was trained both as a ballerina and as a deadly weapon, using her body to entertain a crowd and also to kill. Early montage sequences showcase both her impressive skillset and the impossibly harsh reality of her training, a grueling and often painful process that’s torture for those not strong enough to endure it.
Eventually, she’s offered an assignment. The first major action setpiece of “Ballerina” is somewhat clumsy and unsure of itself, not unlike the novice Eve, who has several moments of self-discovery, in a cheeky Peter Parker mode, where she realizes the weight of throwing a punch in a real-world situation (although this dangerous “World of John Wick” is anything but realistic), and learns the value of improvising with whatever’s around you, using any and all nearby objects as weapons. As the film progresses, the action begins to feel more confident and fluid, especially in moments where it seems like Eve is basically running from one assailant to the next, all without breaking a sweat. Ultimately, it’s vastly clunkier than the balletic beauty of the choreography in Wick’s movies, but there are several moments scattered throughout that feel as though they might have been closely supervised by “Wick” director Chad Stahelski, whose stunts often seemed to take influence from old Saturday morning programs like “Looney Tunes” and “Tom & Jerry.”
This cartoonish style is reflected in a few of the movie’s best sequences like the bloodshed that breaks out when Eve travels to the Prague Continental Hotel to interrogate a possible target (Norman Reedus), and in bludgeoning an attacker with a TV remote, the television in the background cycles through the different channels with each hit, many of which are farcical and possess the same kind of screwball energy that this franchise unashamedly embraces. Wiseman often pits our heroine against the most menacing opponents in the most precarious of situations and steps back to watch with glee as she battles her way out.
It’s an exceptionally violent movie, and, in some ways, feels even more relentless than its predecessors because it’s not nearly as heavy in story and world-building as the “Wick” outings. “Ballerina” finds its most major fault in the handling of Eve’s journey as she fights her way to the top of the pernicious organization that killed her father, eventually meeting the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) face-to-face. She’s not developed as a character in the way that John Wick was in his first movie, defined only by a drive for retribution, not as somebody seeking requiem or anything else on the other side of this eternal bloodbath. A surprise reveal in the film’s climax doesn’t do her any good, either. It feels hailed in from left field in an effort to beef up her personal narrative and the stakes of the action, but insteads reads as distracting and unnecessary.
The movie truly hums when writer Shay Hatten allows its frenetic nature to unfold without interruption. It’s really cool how the last third of this movie is essentially nonstop action as Eve arrives at a snow-covered village where seemingly all of its residents are trained killers with military-grade rifles and knives locked up in their kitchen cabinets that she must get through before she can take down the big bad. One standout sequence in a restaurant is perhaps the bloodiest and extravagantly silliest of the whole movie, as Eve and her aggressor take turns breaking plates over each other’s heads in search of a missing glock. Before long, John Wick shows up to paint the town red himself, and he and Eve make an effective team. Keanu Reeves, now 60, brings the same slightly exhausted confidence to the role, reminding us how glad we are for all of the fine work he’s given us playing the character over the last decade.
Armas fares respectably beside him. She takes what thin writing she’s been given and paints a memorable portrait of a new badass heroine who’d be a real treat to see in future franchise entries facing new enemies on a larger scale. And there’s a feeling throughout “Ballerina” that it wants to be a bigger movie than it actually is, as evidenced by the passive mentioning of worlds of assassins and hit men outside of the bubble where this film takes place. It feels entirely possible that Eve may carry this franchise on her back from this point forward or whenever Reeves (who seems to have a Tom-Cruise-immortality mindset) declares he can’t do it anymore (although, canonically speaking, John Wick is supposed to be dead if you find the ending of the last movie to be credible).
Until then, “Ballerina” is an entirely serviceable spinoff that prematurely has the odds stacked against it because it’s the brainchild of such a highly-praised franchise. Unfortunate as that may be, open-minded fans should be able to recognize its independent worth and appreciate how Wiseman is just as massive of a “Wickie” as you and me.
“Ballerina” opens in theaters on June 6th.