Despite Ana de Armas’ intensity and the visual flair we expect from the John Wick universe, Ballerina struggles to find emotional depth or narrative urgency.
Like its bloodied and bruised protagonist, Ballerina was born into the unenviable space that lies between a rock and a hard place. Any follow-up to the impeccable John Wick quadrilogy was always going to fall short – especially when you replace original director Chad Stahelski with, uh, Len Wiseman (no offence) and Keanu Reeves with almost anyone. The question is just how short does this film fall compared to its predecessors.
As it turns out, a fair distance shorter… but not as bad as it could’ve been.
Ballerina focuses on Eve (an excellent Ana De Armas), who witnessed assassins kill her father and has sworn to become a gun-toting badass to avenge his death. Oh and John Wick is doing his own thing at the same time. It’s a pretty standard tale that fits neatly into this kind of movie while seamlessly sliding into the wider John Wick universe (as it was intended). It should technically work, and it does… on paper at least.
The thing with John Wick movies is that the whole vibe is essentially a big cosmic joke. How can a rip-roaring tale of revenge after the death of a poor puppy not be? Everything is very bloody, well-choreographed, gorgeously filmed, and packed with ridiculous mythology and world-building… but it’s ultimately still a big joke. Most importantly, we get the joke and the whole power revenge fantasy aspect. If someone killed your puppy, wouldn’t you go John Wick on them if you were the Baba Yaga?
But Ballerina’s premise is anchored upon buckets of familial melodrama, most of it taken off the ‘stock standard movie trope’ shelf. It’s just much harder to feel sympathy for highly-trained assassins who we barely know before they die horribly, compared to an adorable puppy. There’s no ‘joke’ underpining this movie’s threadbare story.
I’m being a bit unfair here, so let’s remove Ballerina from the wider John Wick context. The question now become,s “does Ballerina hold up on its own?” Hmm, I guess sort of?
The first two acts are okay and slide into this bonkers universe fairly nicely, if somewhat clumsily. Ballerina is clearly trying to say something about family but it doesn’t seem to know what it wants to convey. It’s like watching two different movies trying to wrestle for control. Where things take a bigger dip are those moments when Keanu shows up as John Wick.
This is definitely not a slight on Keanu or John Wick. I love both actor and character, but his presence here hinders the film more rather than helps it. Even though Wick is deployed sparingly, he’s like a deadly shadow looming in the background. We know he is the deadliest person in this universe, and as competent as Eve is, what chance does she have against Wick?
All these clunky narrative issues are undoubtedly a consequence of the massive reshoots that took place with Stahelski essentially replacing Wiseman, and it’s hard not to notice all the last-minute plot stitching that took place.
What does work in Ballerina are the supporting characters. The returning Ian McShane, Anjelica Huston, and Lance Reddick (gone too soon and will be missed) are always delightful to watch, regardless if you’ve watched any previous John Wick movie, and having Gabriel Byrne drop in inject some gravitas is always welcome. It never gets old watching ridiculously over-qualified actors deliver cheesy, grandiose dialogue that’s clearly been rewritten at least a dozen times. Oh, Norman Reedus is also in this movie, but he’s a relative non-factor to be honest. Not bad, not unforgettable, just…there.
Okay, Ballerina doesn’t quite work story and narrative-wise, plus the rough patchwork script isn’t exactly something to brag about. But what about the action? Now that is something worth heaping praise on.
I don’t need to wax lyrical about the action and fight scenes in each John Wick movie, better writers have already done that. Topping or even just matching what had been showcased previously is a tall order, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see Ballerina make fisticuffs with guns interesting in its own way.
If No Time To Die gave us a teaser on what Ana De Armas can do with a meaty action scene, Ballerina pays that off in spades. De Armas is easily believable as a hardened badass who is driven by vengeance. More importantly, Ballerina follows the ‘action showcases character’ mantra very closely.
Whereas John Wick is slick and smooth thanks to decades of assassin-ing, Eve is still a relative newbie in this deadly world. She’s still ironing out the rawness and it translates to some brutal and exhausting hand-to-hand fight scenes where she cops as much of a beating as her opponents. It takes her several more blows and crazy moves to finally beat her opponents versus Wick’s hardened precision.
(A/N: My only gripe with the fight scenes is how Eve isn’t depicted anywhere near as bloody and bruised as she should be. Show me the sweat and blood damn it.)
The movie also cheekily hangs a lampshade on how she’s a smaller woman fighting several larger men and must therefore be creative. This could’ve been cringey, but Ballerina leans into it by being injecting a surprising amount of slapstick in its action sequences.
One of my favourite scenes in the whole movie starts with a slightly battered and bloodied Eve looking into a broken bathroom mirror. The camera then pulls back to show the absolute carnage she wreaked upon dozens of nameless henchmen. As she makes her way to the exit, stepping past all the broken furniture and crumpled dead bodies, she retrieves knife upon knife from several corpses, almost like she’s admiring her own handiwork kind of way. Now that is the sort of vibe I want in a movie like this.
The action choreography and set pieces tighten up significantly by the third act, which takes place in a snow-covered mountain village. Almost everything is ridiculously entertaining from this point forward. From an almost slapstick fight involving plates in a restaurant to an absurd flamethrower-yes – yes, flamethrower-duel – duel, this is where all the Stahelski reshoots really come to the fore in the best way possible. Sorry Len Wiseman, but I’m never going to believe that you’re the mastermind behind all the crazy stuff in the third act.
It’s hard for Ballerina to fully escape John Wick’s shadow, but as far as spin-offs go, this does an admirable, if slightly rough, job at it. Wick fans will get a pretty decent cocktail of Wick-sonian mythology and gun-fu, while other moviegoers will get an adequately entertaining action romp in which there’s still plenty of creativity to be found in combining fists, guns, and random props.