There’s an exciting 20-minute stretch midway through Ballerina — or From the World of John Wick: Ballerina — that expands the John Wick mythos. These scenes swerve past the series' expectations and break new ground in delightful ways. Unfortunately, what comes before and after is a Wick facsimile through and through, even though the film repeatedly insists it's showing you something novel.
This is the key issue with the Ana de Armas-led action spinoff. For most of its 125-minute runtime, Ballerina remains torn between adhering to the tenets of its franchise mothership and charting its own course. There’s some fun to be found in the movie, but it’s also severely disjointed in obvious ways that reflect its tumultuous production (Ballerina began shooting so long ago that it features the final screen appearance of Lance Reddick, who died in early 2023). The result is a film that ends up less than the sum of its scattered parts, despite its numerous explosions, headshots, and vicious stabbings.
What is Ballerina about?
After her father is killed by a mysterious cult, led by a man named the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), young Eve (Victoria Comte, a spitting image of de Armas) is rescued from their clutches by Wick series mainstay Winston (Ian McShane), owner of the assassins-only Continental Hotel and longtime ally of John Wick. He delivers Eve to the ruthless trainer known as the Director (Anjelica Huston), who last appeared in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum as the head of the Ruska Roma, a Belarusian ballet school and crime syndicate tied to John Wick's origins. Here, she serves as a stern headmistress overseeing Eve's ballet training — a skill she learns alongside fists and bullets, though it doesn’t really come in handy — and her decade-long transformation into an assassin-for-hire.
Ballerina has a distinct overlap with Parabellum, in that we see Eve briefly cross paths with John Wick himself (Keanu Reeves, in all his grunting, exasperated glory), a.k.a the notorious Baba Yaga. The duo’s fleeting exchange establishes them as diametrically opposed archetypes. Wick wants to leave behind this world of contract killers — much as he does in his four-part series, after he exacts his puppy-inspired vengeance. The starstruck Eve, meanwhile, desperately wants to enter Wick's world of assassinations, so she can exact her own revenge on her father's killers.
To add to this nominal differentiation, Eve repeatedly fails tests involving hand-to-hand combat and close-quarters gun-fu, shot (by cinematographer Romain Lacourbas) and choreographed (by a large team of stunt coordinators, many of them John Wick veterans) in the traditionally fluid John Wick style. That is, until her assassin mentor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) commands Eve to fight on her own terms, rather than letting her male counterparts dictate their sparring. "Fight like a girl," she tells Eve with a wry smile, before dropping hints about using agility and intellect instead of raw strength. A lightbulb seems to go off in the ballerina's head. However, what follows during each combat and shooting simulation is the exact same blocking and choreography as before (only with a few added kicks to the groin).
It's the first of several instances where the dialogue attempts to lay claim to a brand new path for the series, while the action plays out like a John Wick pastiche: the same Judo takedowns and quick clip-emptying, shot with the same verve and atmosphere, but edited with far less impact. As Eve is sent on her first mission to a nightclub, the neon pink and blue-hued setting is practically ripped from previous Wick films, down to the action being backdropped by the slow-motion writhing of unbothered dancers. Scene after scene, these uncannily familiar elements play host to lesser versions of fights we’ve already seen, but assembled with less finesse.
The pieces of Ballerina rarely fit together
When the plot finally gets moving, and Eve begins tracking down information on her target — leading her to an alluring new assassin with an oddly truncated role, played by Norman Reedus — Ballerina becomes torn between motivations. This results in de Armas never having enough pathos to feel worthy of this particular, grief-steeped series — for John Wick, the fact that "it was never just a puppy" is always clear.
On one hand, Eve is driven by vengeance and deep-seated rage. On the other hand, her tale quickly becomes entangled with that of a young girl with whom she empathizes, one who becomes a kidnapping target for the cult like Eve once was. However, this symbol of Eve’s lost innocence doesn’t complicate her trajectory in any way, or have any real impact on the plot. In fact, it’s just one of several inconsistencies that makes Ballerina such a strange film to watch.
Byrne’s Chancellor is, for all intents and purposes, the movie’s key antagonist from the word go, since he leads the interrogation and slaying of Eve’s father. However, young Eve is distanced from her villain. She never sees his face in the prologue, an oddly specific visual information which is clarified when they finally come face to face and she doesn’t recognize him. His actions ought to make Eve’s mission deeply personal, but it’s unclear if she ever finds out who he really is, beyond being the leader of an organization she hopes to bring down. In the process, she’s kept at an arm’s length from the most involving and tragic parts of her own story.
There’s a lack of urgency to the movie at times, in part because of these dramatic inconsistencies. Its action scenes don’t feel nearly as personal as they should, both in terms of what Eve is trying to achieve, and in the context of how her scenes are staged. Her movements never feel like extensions of her character; her choreography is only ever mapped onto the existing body language Wick exhibits in the rest of the series. Despite the film's title, the one skill set that differentiates Eve from her male counterparts — her ballet training — is somehow never put to use, even during a fight scene on ice that requires finding balance. And the running thread about the act of killing weighing on her conscience is also swiftly dropped.
Add to this the fact that several fight scenes lack a coherent sense of geography and space between the characters, and what you’re left with is a disorienting movie that never fully clicks. This often feels like the product of Ballerina's many reshoots — several months' worth, reported to have been spearheaded by John Wick series helmer Chad Stahelski, rather than credited director Len Wiseman — whose seams show in occasional moments of janky ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement), and unclean digital face replacement to hide de Armas' stunt doubles.
Ballerina works best when it isn’t John Wick
There’s an imaginative streak to some of the action in Ballerina, from its Tchaikovsky- and Vivaldi-influenced soundtrack and score (by composers Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard), to the comically excessive presence of flamethrowers and hand grenades. But its action scenes are so awash in cartoonish digital effects that fly in the face of the grounded, tactile, blood-squib-heavy productions that made Reeves' versions so damn thrilling. The film is at its weakest when it’s trying to be a John Wick sequel — which, unfortunately, is the majority of its runtime.
However, there’s a turn about midway through that feels unlike any Wick movie in its setting, theme, and choreography, leading to a stretch of action and story that feels almost worth the price of admission. The hour-long wait for this sequence can be frustrating, but when Eve catches up to the cult’s headquarters — located in a quaint, snowy mountain town — the film zigzags in raucous ways.
Part of the fun of the Wick films is how they reveal seedy metropolitan underbellies to have secret criminal entanglements. This doesn’t happen much in Ballerina, making Eve’s initial night-time missions through crowded cities feel like mechanical, soulless retreads. However, her daylight rendezvous to the peaceful mountainside goes off the rails for equal and opposite reasons, as everyday Samaritans — from parents and tourists, to small business owners — become part of the action in unexpected ways. Even the so-called normal life that Wick craves, and that Eve has intentionally left behind, harbors gloomy secrets, out in the open.
It's a ridiculously bleak turn that yields some of the series’ most entertaining action yet (involving several household items), though it doesn’t last long before being toppled by clunkily written melodrama, whose twists and turns aren’t given nearly enough weight or time to land. The preceding set pieces are so wildly entertaining that it’s hard not to feel robbed of some truly inventive action filmmaking when they’re eventually — and inevitably — derailed by a half-baked story.
By the end, what little individuality the film contains is entirely subsumed by the larger franchise. De Armas even ends up dressed in John Wick chic before the credits roll. But rather than playing like an organic character choice, it resembles flimsy cosplay — an unfortunate metaphor for Ballerina as a whole.
