BALLERINA
2025
Directed by Len Wiseman
Written by Shay Hatten
Spoilers: high (for nerds, anyway; for non-nerds who can already guess what could go wrong with an action movie smooshed into a preexisting intellectual property, moderate)
It's not its onscreen title—at least I'm pretty sure it's not, though it didn't occur to me at the time to be on the lookout, so let's say that I hope it's not—but Ballerina's distributor, Lionsgate, desperately wants you to be aware of its connection with the John Wick tetralogy, and hence has marketed it with the heaviest possible emphasis on that connection, under a name that could be read From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. And for starters, that's actually a misuse of a preposition, but Subsequently Attached To the World of John Wick: Ballerina sounds even worse; apparently what we have in Ballerina is a concept created by Shay Hatten the better part of a decade ago, in truth inspired by the trendsetter that was John Wick, but instead of one more Wick-style fashion magazine actioner to stand alongside Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's film (Atomic Blonde, for an example of such a thing coming from Leitch himself), the ideas Hatten had come up with for Ballerina were interpolated into the Wick films themselves, perhaps because his Ballerina script seems to have gotten him the gig of making his credited debut on John Wick: Chapter 3-Parabellum, where the notion of the deadly Ruska Roma ballet school first appeared. He and Stahelski then played the long game, waiting for the right time.
Well, with John's journey having come to a definitive end (Hatten also co-wrote Chapter 4), I guess the time was never going to get better, and Hatten finally got his movie made, whether we call it simply Ballerina or the ugly thing,* and under what turns out to be the extremely double-edged sword of being able to take place in the urban fantasy underworld that the Wicks had established; my understanding is that over the years, a lot of script doctors gave their input, and it's certain that it wouldn't resemble Hatten's original vision, but then, neither would he want it to, and whatever happened, Hatten retains the sole onscreen screenwriting credit. For his part, Stahelski—who had some sort of break-up with Leitch after John Wick, and has therefore been the principal shepherd of the Wick universe since then—nevertheless farmed it out, probably owing to the severity of his workload these days, though I don't know why you'd farm it out to has-been-if-he-ever-was B-action director Len Wiseman, except that I suppose there would be a better than even chance that Stahelski would have to be an Underworld fan. Turns out (or it allegedly turns out: Wiseman and Stahelski both deny it, but then, they're both professionals) this didn't really save the shepherd any work, and there are at least reports that Stahelski directed, solo, up to two-thirds of the film by way of what were politely termed "reshoots." And hell, for all I know this is a rumor designed to give people permission to like a Len Wiseman movie.
I am inclined to believe it myself, because I tend to have more admiration for Stahelski than Wiseman, but the real shocker is that this exceeds any expectation I would have had from Stahelski by this point, too; so the speculation I'd have to make there is we still owe Wiseman some considerable thanks, even if all we need to thank him for was handing Stahelski a bunch of footage that didn't live up to his standards, compelling him to take his production in hand at the eleventh hour and just crank out a whole lot of full-on freeform crazy John Wick action nonsense, without all of the aggravating bloat and loginess that had begun accumulating upon the series after Chapter 2 and damn near sank Chapter 3 for me (and which still didn't do Chapter 4 too many favors). Ballerina, anyway, is 125 minutes long and feels like it's getting as much action done as both of those latter Wicks, despite those films averaging to roughly two and a half hours apiece**, though what I guess I must mean by this is that it has better action than either, with more personality to each individual setpiece and so many of the individual beats within the setpieces, so that any given two minute segment in Ballerina is likelier to feel unique and hence dramatic (and, for that matter, cool) when set against any other two minute segment of Ballerina, which was only somewhat the case in Chapter 4 and often not the case at all in Chapter 3. (The John Wick films can have a pretty inescapable resemblance to unplayable video games, but Chapter 3 could honestly feel like its goal was to obtain pleasure out of the depiction of repetitive tasks.) And so, for this reason—and I'll throw out another possible one: Ballerina's deadly ballerina, Ana de Armas, aged thirty-seven, is twelve years younger than Keanu Reeves was when he played John Wick for the first time—Ballerina is readily my favorite John Wick since the series highwater mark of Chapter 2, just no contest. This is a very positive review, then, that may still turn out to be tinged with bitter disappointment, for all this film had to do was just keep cruising right down the path it already had set, and it would've been the best John Wick movie, period. But it didn't, which means that this John Wick movie actually fails on account of its plot, something that just shouldn't be able to happen with a John Wick movie, yet paradoxically only can because it is a John Wick movie. I mean, there's fanservice, then there's whatever this fucking degeneracy is.
That plot, then, concerns young Eve Macarro (presently Victoria Comte, and in a world that stopped caring much about whether child actors in prologues bore even a remote resemblance to their adult actor counterparts, kudos to a casting director for actually trying!), who witnesses the murder of her father (David Castaneda) at the hands of the creepy boss of one of the numerous "tribes" of the international patchwork of assassins' guilds that constitutes the entirety of the Wick narrative universe, with the wrinkle, unknown to Eve, that this is his father-in-law, and Eve's grandfather, which will be of such vital importance to film's story that he won't ever receive a name (he's played by Gabriel Byrne), and what he was there for was to forcibly repatriate Eve to her family. Eve's father does secure her escape, however, entrusting her to series regular and hotelier Winston (Ian McShane), who renders her to the director of the Ruska Roma ballet (Anjelica Huston). And so does Eve grow up to become a ballerina who, with festering hatred in her heart, shall choose the violent side of her new family's business, graduating as one of their soldiers some twelve years and change later (meaning de Armas's character is, like, twenty-one—she is at least not barred entry at the numerous assassins' underworld clubs in which so many of this film's super-murders occur—which I'm sure is very flattering). She aces her first mission, and goes on some number of subsequent ones; on her most recent jaunt, however, she spies the mark of the tribe that killed her dad. She claims vengeance, but the director brusquely dismisses her desire, for there are rules yada yada, and Eve, of course, disobeys, setting off for the Continental where she's traced one of her prospective enemies (Norman Reedus), discovers there's something screwy about his deal, deftly avoids turning the rest of the film into an escort mission for the young daughter that mirrors Eve's own childhood precisely (Ava Joyce McCarthy), but also gets herself in her adversaries' cross-hairs, leading to several great big battles and eventually a one-woman invasion of her grandfather's whole village of assassins in the Alps where she comes face-to-face with a sister she barely knew and thought was dead all these years (Catalina Sandino Moreno), who's also been trying to kill her pretty much this whole time.
Simple, even boilerplate stuff for the most part, which isn't much of a sin and doesn't make it stand out much from any previous Wick, the first of which, storywise, got by on the surprisingly soulful novelty hook of a godlike killer taking vengeance for a dog, and if it's not worthwhile to compare this to the second, well, it's not like there's any profit in expecting a legitimate embodiment of Orphic myth in your cool action movies every single time. Eve, anyway, is a very solid counter-Wick with a completely different temperament: Reeves's grim reaper is exchanged for an angrier one, which is distinctive enough in de Armas's performance to give the film around her a distinctive temperament of its own even if it's still very recognizably "John Wick," like some swell dry comedy that works its way through the cracks between the action sequences, notably de Armas's wonderful reaction to the unexpectedly great line, "may I be frank (Abraham Popoola)?"; meanwhile, as far as "godlike killers" go, obviously Eva performs the same function, as a one-person mobile slaughterhouse, but they're able to throttle back substantially on John's invulnerability, with de Armas and whichever stuntwomen were helping her out making it very clear that Eve's a newer and less seasoned killer who has to work harder than John usually did. (And my observation about de Armas's age goes to that: a then-thirty-five year old can worry at least a little bit less about throwing their whole damn back out, and I do think it shows.) Hence the worst thing for a while was a minor irritant inside an otherwise rad "fashioning the Ballerina" montage, where the screenplay takes recourse to the phrases "lean in" and "fight like a girl" in the same monologue***, something a spin-off from a series that's been almost completely indifferent to male/female dichotomies the whole time probably didn't require (but, man, if it helped them avoid Eva taking care of a Goddamn child the entire rest of movie, it was worth it), and mostly grated because it suggested a lack of confidence that wasn't being borne out by anything else, at least not yet.
This puts us at a crossroads, where I wonder if I should frontload the negative because it is a positive review, or if I should first detail everything else the movie's doing well so as to replicate the profoundly unpleasant experience of watching a splendid actioner shit itself on the screen. I opt for the former, perhaps to prepare you in a way I was not: so this is a John Wick spin-off, right? Yes, and technically some manner of prequel, which is reasonable so far as it goes; you will naturally want your Reeves cameo and we get it, and lo, it's actually decent—John tries to impart some wisdom on Eve, knowing that she will undoubtedly choose to become a weapon if only to dull her pain, and he recaptures all of his melancholy in a nicely compact bit of performance and screenwriting.
And then I guess someone said, "But dudes, what if Eve fought John?", and everyone clapped, and took the rest of the day off, never examining whether that was a good idea, or how to turn it into a something like a good idea—because Jesus, it's even the film's worst fight, with barely even one good beat in it, and we're comparing it to fights with complete randos that often have a half-dozen outstanding beats in them apiece—all with the rather grotesque side-effect of making Eve subordinate and secondary in her own film, which is still before we start continuity-picking about whether it "makes sense," which it doesn't to the point of being mildly contemptuous. Perhaps there's some alternative universe where this was some radical franchise experiment, and John actually did kill her, where John's participation sort of "works" on an airlessly intellectual level; but naturally it's not that, it's Eve trying with all her might to kill John and John brushing her aside while laconically pleading "you've made your choyce, but you can still chews," eventually siding with her by way of a benign neutrality which gets even more condescending when he's not even rigorous about it. It slags the momentum so hard that I can't think of something offhand to compare it to; and anyway, it's inserted (I wonder if this was a reshoot) into a third act that was already wobbling a bit on account of that more perennial Wick weakness, specifically effete and ineffectual master villains. Ballerina has the added demerit of its effete, ineffectual villain actually having an articulable worldview, and that's something this series hasn't ever really done, so it's awfully disappointing when they crank up the "hypocritical pure evil" dial instead, so that all the groundwork they've laid—a villain who's established a thriving community of killers, where they live whole and open lives, altogether a quaint ski village utopia that is built, obviously, on horrifying externalities, but is not without its logic—goes entirely to waste.
Well, that's a lot of salient bad, and all of it hits at the worst time right in the final half hour. Yet even that final half hour is possibly, on average, still very good, since it's the final half hour where this film's "wait'll they get a load of me, nobody's ever done this one before" gesture winds up, to wit, a flamethrower duel. I can't imagine it's even remotely as practical as it looks, but it's one of those absurdly cool things that do still happen every now and again that prove that, you know, cinema isn't quite dead, and I would like to emphasize that it's substantially more involved than the novelty gimmick of it would sound like—I mean, it really is a motherfucking flamethrower fight, not just "two flamethrower-wielders connected via editing," and at least in that one moment, the real grace note of it, where Eve's assailant is also kicking her with his flaming foot like this were a Street Fighter game, my brain definitely perceived it as practical. And the flamethrower fight is just one jolt of ecstasy amongst so many here, which themselves rest atop the customary Wick franchise comforts—Romain Lacourbas's cinematography and Philip Ivey's production are arguably a skosh less accomplished than that their more laureled peers on the main branch of the series, but they are at a minimum satisfying the series style guide of sleekness and aristocratic elegance, and frequently doing more than the minimum, so that I wouldn't be able to dismiss you out of hand if you told me the best action sequence was Eve's first in a ridiculous concept nightclub that's going to keep Die Another Day's cinematographer and production designer up at night now, because it's what they wish their ice palace had looked like.
And it does, anyway, have the most gorgeously aggressive color style in the film in its coruscating pinks and pale blues, while the action really showcases stunt coordinators Stephen Dunlevy and/or Kyle Gardiner's move away, ironically, from avowed choreography and towards burlier combat and heftier hits; but just as importantly, it's showcasing what I was talking about with personality, or uniqueness, so that in an action franchise where the NPCs were sometimes allowed to very obviously be NPCs, Ballerina manages to make a shockingly huge percentage of its cast of extras, who of course exist only to be victims, special in their own precious way—right here in this ice palace we already have two of them, two members of the gang chasing Eve simultaneously, and it's beautifully communicated that one of them is smarter and more skilled than his comrade, and neither one is even the gang's leader. Later, Eve is confronted with an evil cook at an inn, and there's this extraordinary beat, my single favorite in the movie, involving searching through a heap of plates for whole ones such as are still useful for beating the other one in the head with. Even when they really are anonymous bloodbags, there's fine style to how they die: a slasher-ready victim rolled up in a clear plastic tarp, for example, or that whole scene with grenades which embraces as much as anything in this series video game mechanics—that's one way to solve a door puzzle—but in a way that feels like it's living up to the highest goals of action cinema, as well as to the standard this series has set for itself, and that standard isn't even the Wachowskis or John Woo anymore; it's not the first time these films have invoked Buster Keaton, but it is the first time a John Wick film, which is not John Wick's film, and would be approaching the level of a masterpiece if it were only a little less of one, truly manages a sustained sense of action-comedy. I mean, I was hootin' and hollerin' all over.
Score: 8/10
*Though probably doesn't help that between there and here, there was a whole other movie made in Korea about assassins called Ballerina.
**But then I look it up and Chapter 3 was only 131 minutes and Chapter 4 fully 169, so the upswing really was already there.
***Largely redeemed by the neat Evanescence original end credits pop song called "Fight Like a Girl," which I'd like regardless because 1)more movies should have original pop songs like they used to and 2)it's doing what a lot of the music, including Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richards's score, is doing, and situating this exactly where a John Wick ought to live, vibes-wise, which is intractably stuck in the immediate post-Matrix early 00s.
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