As a devoted disciple of the “John Wick” franchise — I kicked off my 20th birthday celebration by going to see “John Wick: Chapter 4” for the second time in theaters — I was skeptical when I heard about a spinoff.
The concept seemed intriguing, as a film following the tattooed ballerinas/assassins briefly glimpsed in the third “John Wick” movie, but often background details are better left just that. Ana de Armas being attached to star in the movie also seemed promising, as she had an incredible role as a gun-fighting spy in the last James Bond movie, “No Time to Die.”
But the franchise director (Chad Stahelski) was not going to direct, instead Len Wiseman would. And the movie’s title did not bode well; it went through multiple iterations and was, last I checked, “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.” Thankfully, it seems the film has dispensed with that, and is sticking with the far more elegant “Ballerina.”
So despite it all, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself deeply enjoying “Ballerina.” The story is direly generic, though the “John Wick” franchise was never exactly about the story.
“Ballerina” follows Eve Maccaro, who as a young girl, witnesses her assassin father get murdered by a gang of soldiers, led by a mysterious, icy man known only as the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). Eve just manages to escape and is whisked off to New York City by Winston (Ian McShane), a “John Wick” series regular. She joins the theater where we learned John Wick grew up, which was run by the Director (Anjelica Huston), who is in the business of raising young boys and girls to become deadly assassins.
Flash-forward 12 years, and Eve is a grown woman, ready to become a full-fledged killer-for-hire. She actually plays a slightly different role, as a hired bodyguard, so she’s taught to protect just as she’s taught to kill.
From there, the movie flies like a bullet (or, more accurately, like a barrage of them). It’s a series of ridiculous action scenes that feel like a collection of cast-off ideas that hadn’t gotten the chance to be used in the previous “John Wick” movies, strung together by the barest semblance of a plot.
Essentially, during one mission, Eve is attacked by men who bear the same ominous scar she saw on her attackers when she was a child. With no further information, she embarks on a quest that takes her to Eastern Europe to enact vengeance.
But the reason I — and hopefully everyone else — go to any of these movies is for the action, and “Ballerina” over-delivers on that front. It’s not entirely up to par with the formal elegance of the “John Wick” movies, but it’s nowhere near a knock-off. The action scenes are filmed cleanly, letting us revel in the rhythmic chaos of punches, gunshots, and body slams. Wiseman does a very good job of imitating Stahelski, though apparently Stahelski himself may have directed some of the scenes.
It strikes the perfect balance of bloody, thrilling, and frankly hilarious — a very funny gag that defines the movie is that Eve’s first mission features her using a gun with rubber bullets, and she actually refrains from killing her enemies when she has the chance. But then the very next scene, and every scene after that, is packed with wonderfully gruesome deaths. People in this film get killed with everything from kitchen utensils to hockey skates to flamethrowers to several spectacular uses of grenades and duct tape.
The biggest stumbles in the film revolve around the completely unnecessary, and heavily-marketed, inclusion of Keanu Reeves as the iconic John Wick. He is in the movie far more than a brief cameo. While I’ll never be unhappy to see Reeves playing the role, his purpose in the story is clumsily shoehorned in and distracting. It feels like the studio doesn’t trust the movie to stand on its own. It also makes no sense, storywise, considering what we know John Wick was doing in his own movies at the time this is set.
Further, Gabriel Byrne is a fantastic actor but wasted as the film’s villain. There’s a good joke in the movie that takes the absurd premise of literally everyone being a secret assassin. But the villains never feel frightening or particularly dangerous, even though other characters constantly say it.
But regardless, “Ballerina” takes all the silly tropes and comic-book details of “John Wick” and turns it up to 11, while never losing a sense of self-awareness. There’s a shotgun-toting Norman Reedus running around the streets of Prague, and Ana de Armas in a flamethrower duel. For action fans, there’s not really much else to ask for.
“Ballerina” is now playing in theaters.
Reach writer Justin Shen at arts@dailyuw.com. X: @justinnshen, BlueSky: @jshenn.bsky.social
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