The official title of Ballerina (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, so as to prevent unwitting travelers from taking the off-ramp to Headshot City. Inventory: This Wick spinoff is nestled between the third and fourth films in the franchise. It stars the same thing, namely, wig-flipping fights and action sequences. It also features appearances by familiar faces, including Keanu “Yeeeeahhhhh” Reeves and Ian McShane, but the focus is squarely on Ana de Armas as a fresh-faced kicker of tuckuses and shooter of heads, newly emergent in the increasingly dense-of-myth-and-worldbuilding Wickiverse. Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard, a couple of Underworlds) directs, reportedly with a big assist from director of all four main Wicks, Chad Stahelski – and what we’re left to wrestle with here is, is being two-thirds of a regular Wick enough for a movie to stand on its own? Quoth Keanu: Yeeeeahhhhh.
BALLERINA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: So are they fighting yet? Pretty much: We open a dozenish years ago, when young Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte) watched her father die at the hands of some jerkholes led by a sinister man known only as The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). Eve is taken by the inimitable Winston (McShane) to her father’s “family,” which strikes me less as “blood” and more as “underground brainwashing outfit that churns out assassins – and ballerinas.” As soon as we see Anjelica Huston as The Director (lotsa folks in this movie with the first name of “The”), it clicks: Aha! This movie is, indeed, From The World of John Wick! Remember the scene from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum where Huston watched as a ballerina plies and falls, plies and falls, until her feet bleed? Well, that was adult Eve (de Armas). She even briefly meets Wick Himself (Reeves), who essentially anoints her as unkillable, and assures us that yes, indeed, she will survive all manner of seemingly unsurvivable situations.
The Ruska Roma is a shadowy org that turns regular folk into jiu-jitsu gunplay killing-ass motherf—ers like John Wick and Eve’s dad. The ladies have to work through ballerina training before they get to the fire-bullet-eject-clip-pop-in-new-clip-fire-bullet bit, though, which struck me as 50 percent sexist and 50 percent helpful, because if anything will help a mean as hell cold blooded damn killer avoid death, it’s a good ol’ grand jete. (Hey, it almost makes sense if you stop thinking about it fast enough.) And Eve is pretty damn terrific with the bullets and clips, and the arm bars and hi-yah chops – and when the moment calls for it, a nice ‘n’ brutal kick to the yarbles. She pleads for some action, and is sent to (you get three guesses and the first two don’t count) a neon-drenched nightclub (you guessed it! Here’s your cookie!) to get her feet wet against a small cadre of faceless guys just waiting to be tossed off balconies, thrown through glass and/or forced to eat some lead. Well, rubber lead. Training wheels for the first gig, you see.
There’s a reason Eve wants to be this way. Yes. Right. The money. No! That was a typo. It’s for (here it comes) R E V E N G E. The crud daddies who killed her father are A-number-one on her list of long-term kill goals. And this is when the fighting and the shooting and all that gets wild. She works her way through the ins and outs of the Wickiverse Assassin Underworld, with its gold coins and fancy hotels and clotty conglomerations of obscure rules, and it’s like, shut up and get to the punching, although I was happy there was no mention of all that High Table nonsense in this movie. Once Eve gets rolling, though, she’s very Wickish in her rules, schmules approach to mowing through bad guys. She has the Wick Will that allows her to take an obscene amount of punishment and still get up and finish the fight. We barely have any time to question the plausibility of such things because we’re too busy feeling our eyes involuntary widen as Eve grabs a string of hand grenades and a flamethrower and – well, you know what she does with them: Puts on the world’s most violentest ballet.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Time to rewatch Atomic Blonde, which had a less comprehensible story, but one specific, highly memorable action sequence that eclipses everything we see in Ballerina.
Performance Worth Watching: Well, de Armas can tumble down a set of stone steps as well as any man, not that we’re surprised by that. She wisely sidesteps the balance of down-to-the-marrow melancholy and steely reserve of Reeves’ characterization of Wick, and leans into Eve’s transition from the wide-eyed earnestness – notably de Armas’ strong suit – to disher-outter of the harshest of harsh realities. The screenplay gives her a modest arc, and she elevates it just a bit.
Memorable Dialogue: Advice to Eve from her mentor, Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster): “Fight like a girl.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: About a third of the way through Ballerina — not to be confused with the 2023 Netflix movie Ballerina, another movie where a female enacts revenge on untold amounts of people — I wondered to myself, Where’s the Chaplin and Looney Tunes? Silent-film slapstick and cartoonish hyperbole were key components of the main Wick movies, undercutting the brutality with some savvily applied dark physical comedy. And then we get a literal glimpse of Chaplin in Ballerina’s second-funniest scene, and a bit with a bunch of dinner plates in its first-funniest, thus answering the question and making me feel better about everything for a minute. Oh, and don’t ask what she does with ice skates, although I can confirm that, no, in fact, she doesn’t use them to skate on ice. Don’t be ridiculous.
Wiseman maintains the deadpan-silly tone of the franchise, although the pacing is off, the first half of the film clunkling along unsure of itself as Eve finds her footing as a ruthless slayer of people who obviously deserve slaying. But once it works through the wobbly bits and Eve finds her focus, it achieves an ascendant trajectory of such velocity that our protagonist has nary a millisecond to contemplate what kind of person she’s become. No spoiler: Reeves-as-Wick pops up a couple times in Ballerina – for an essentially unnecessary, but not quite unwelcome, assist – and in a key moment, he brings up to Eve ideas about fate and choice. And despite some awkward insistence that Eve chose to be this person, the truth is, she isn’t. That choice was made when her child brain was still a wad of underdeveloped mush. (It surely happened to Mr. Wick, too, you know.) Feel free to be disturbed by this at the same time you’re happy for it and all the sadistic entertainment we get out of it. Sadistic and cathartic, I might add, because that’s why action movies like this exist, as a fantastical, escapist release, cognitive dissonance be damned.
But we’re not here to ponder the morality of a thoroughly absurdist world of killers and secret cabals – and no cops ever, since they’d just wet-blanket the violent reverie with some cockamamie notion that the world needs something as hopeless as order. Reports that Stahelski reshot a pile of action sequences – with or without Wiseman, it isn’t clear – seem self-evident as we watch the film progress to an old-world locale somewhere in Ze Alps, I think, a robust location that’s so beautiful, it could only be made better with the strategic application of approximately 300 corpses. I was ultimately satisfied with Ballerina for its brainstem-eviscerating, skillfully choreographed, brilliantly conceptualized displays of wanton death, its best sequences holding a worthy candle to the medium-high points of the Wicks, which have become the gold standard for modern action films (alongside the Mission: Impossibles, of course). We shouldn’t expect or ask for anything more from a spinoff than what Ballerina gives us.
Our Call: Ballerina is worthy of the franchise, which is no mean feat. Sure, the connection between ballet and death dealing is tenuous to nonexistent in this movie, but anyone looking for thematic coherence just pressed play on the wrong flick. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
