The dumbest move in Ballerina, an action-movie spinoff from the John Wick series, comes when a scene from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum plays out within earshot of Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas). It’s not that this moment constitutes the lazy fan service some might have feared upon realizing that Ballerina really would involve the limited participation of Keanu Reeves playing the “Baba Yaga” assassin himself. In fact, the shoehorning is kind of cute, like when the Marty McFly of Back To The Future Part II sees a scene from the earlier movie play out in front of him. No, the problem is that when the audience and Eve overhear the Director (Anjelica Huston), the forbidding headmistress of a school for murderous ballerinas, mention Wick’s original motivation (“All this over a puppy?”), there’s an immediate jolt of recognition around how pedestrian Eve’s in-progress backstory has been by comparison.
It doesn’t seem that way to Eve, of course. Early in her life, her father attempts to take her away from the mysterious, cult-like organization with ties to her already-dead mother; he’s killed in the process, leaving Eve alone and grieving. Winston (Ian McShane), the owner of the underworld-friendly New York Continental Hotel, steers her toward the Director’s school, where she is trained to dance, fight, and kill. (Within the school’s walls, at least, it’s the dancing that looks the bloodiest.)
The reasons behind any and all of that training remain murky. The ballet company’s repertoire seems limited to ballets that the filmmakers imagine the average moviegoer has heard of (so, mostly just Swan Lake). Their more clandestine operations are vaguely described as protection gigs, like they’re bodyguard version of the contract killers Wick used to run with, but who hires them, how much leeway they’re given with their deadliness, why they need the ballet-company front, and whether they are unionized are among the questions that go unanswered. When Eve’s mentor urges her to shift her strategy to “fight like a girl,” the movie seems too cautious to fully define what that means for the characters. Eventually, a possible working definition emerges: Maybe it’s a cross between Jackie Chan prop work and slasher-style gimmick kills? Eve does maintain a certain scrappiness when she’s backed into a corner; it’s not panic, exactly, but she betrays a little more desperation than the precision grace of Wick (who, yes, does pop up again later in this film, which by that point has improved enough that it doesn’t really need him). Ultimately, though, the movie doesn’t give much thought to the gendering of its action, and the line is mainly fodder to inspire the lyrics for one of two (!) end-credit Evanescence songs.
Evanescence isn’t the only Elektra-coded element of Ballerina. It shares with that movie and so many other lady-centric action pictures a conviction that the softer, more feminine side of ruthless ass-kicking must involve an imperiled child. When attempting to track down the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), the leader of the group that killed her father, Eve comes across his latest victim—another potentially orphaned young girl—ostensibly to give her mission of revenge greater emotional heft. Yet none of this stuff, largely but not exclusively confined to a rote opening 30 minutes or so, works as well as the seemingly lower-stakes but far more evocatively handled saga of John Wick’s dog. The rest of the series builds out from that groundwork in the first film so that Wick, no matter how superhuman his abilities may seem, feels like some kind of a human being; Eve, by comparison, mostly feels like a character in a vengeful-woman action movie.
Ah, but as such a movie, Ballerina has the necessary chops; it’s not quite Atomic Blonde, but it outdoes the straight-to-streaming actioners that already tried for a daughter-of-Wick feel. The film underwent some reshoots and/or additional photography last year, reportedly to pump up its action sequences; whether director Len Wiseman or Wick overseer Chad Stahelski ultimately spent more time behind the camera, they’ve engineered a great bunch of them, sending de Armas through a gauntlet of shoot-outs, flamethrower duels, and kitchenware melees, accented with plenty of snowflakes, explosions, and neon club lighting. Stahelski productions may have a familiar bag of tricks at this point, but their variations are blessedly well-crafted; anyone sick of low-contrast color schemes and hazy lighting in big-budget fantasies should take refuge in Wick-world.
Ballerina is also occasionally quite funny, particularly when it riffs on franchise standbys, like the scene where our gun-toting hero must visit a bespoke arms supplier. The filmmakers, presumably aware of how audiences expect setpieces to be doled out in such a familiar story, do their best to keep the explosive kick-offs to these sequences happening (and not happening) at off-kilter times. One clever sequence picks up from a brief time jump to track Eve through the aftermath of a signature Wick-style club battle, as she plucks a few knives from dead bodies on her way out the door (and toward a satisfying bit of punctuation).
Why, exactly, the movie has jumped forward two months for this scene, is difficult to recall. The opening stretch of Ballerina seems to be dancing around something, as if the reshoots may have altered what, exactly, differentiates the Chancellor and his assassins from the rest of the underworld, or what the Director’s goals for her little dance-assassin school are. (Perhaps this last point was further muddied in hopes of differentiating it from Marvel’s Red Room business?). This unmooring does no favors to Ana de Armas, a talented performer who here lacks the soulfulness of Reeves as well as the disarming cheerfulness of her showcase sequence in No Time To Die. Yet is it not enough to simply be a stunningly beautiful, physically expressive movie star pretending to improvise new forms of deadly weapons? Ballerina may not carry the same level of bonkers conviction as a John Wick movie, but for most of its running time, it makes Ana de Armas wielding a knife-gun seem like more or less the essence of cinema.
Director: Len Wiseman
Writer: Shay Hatten
Starring: Ana de Armas, Gabriel Byrne, Anjelica Huston, Norman Reedus, Ian McShane, Keanu Reeves
Release Date: June 6, 2025
