To Dance the Dance of the Kill

The John WickStarted as a tale of redemption and then revenge (in that order), the John Wick series has grown to be a adynamic, reliable action series that doesn't skimp on the hard hits and gun-toting thrills, elevating Keanu Reeves as one of the greatest action stars ever. series probably went on longer than it needed to. I say this as a fan of the films, enjoying the stylish, over-the-top action, interesting cinematography, cool world building, and a properly understated, but fun, performance from Keanu Reeves. The films helped revitalize Reeves’s career, and they are really great. It’s just that as the films went on, the world building became more overwrought, and it felt like the films weren’t quite sure where to go, or what to do, to bring the central character to his proper conclusion. It eventually got there, but I do feel like we probably could have had the story condensed down into one less movie and it would have been fine.

Lionsgate films (the distribution company that also owns the rights to the franchise) has been loath to let the property die, and they’ve tried to find ways to extend the franchise out even though the series ended on a pretty definitive note with John Wick: Chapter 4. Along with a potential John Wick: Chapter 5, set sometime in a different point in the character’s life, Lionsgate also produced The Continental, a prequel television series about the world of the franchise, and now they have Ballerina, a spin-off midquel set during the run of the films. Do we need all these stories? Maybe not, but at least in the case of Ballerina, the resulting adventure is pretty cool.

For those unaware, the film is a true spin-off set between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4. The third film featured a sequence set at the headquarters of the Ruska Roma, with Wick encountering one of the organization’s trained ballerina-killers. A brief bit of dialogue between him and the ballerina, at the time played by Unity Phelan, was had, and that was the spark that was needed to create the new film. Phelan bowed out, Ana de Armas was brought in to play the character, and the spin-off was set up with director Len Wiseman with a release pegged to 2025. And now we have the film and, yeah… it’s not bad.

The film focuses on that ballerina, starting off when the girl, Eve Macarro, was young (and played by Victoria Comte). She lived with her father, Javier (David Castañeda), at his estate, and their life was happy. As it turned out, though, Javier shouldn’t have had Eve with him. She was the granddaughter of the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), who was the head of some secret organization of killers, and Javier took her away so she wouldn’t grow up to be just another killer. Once the Chancellor tracked them down, though, he tried to take Eve back while punishing Javier… with his death. But Eve escaped the kidnapping, and ended up with the Ruska Roma (with a little help from Continental Hotel manager Winston Scott, once more played by Ian McShane) so she could train to be one of their “kikimora” protective killers.

Eve (now played by de Armas) spent years training for her role, learning how to be an assassin so she could fight against the assassins. As a kikimora, her job was to protect life. She was assigned targets that she would guard, and she would only kill as needed to get the job done. But deep down she still had a target, the Chancellor, who she wanted to kill as pay back for the death of her father. She’d pursue this quest anywhere, despite the orders of the Director of the Ruska Roma (Anjelica Huston), and if Eve wasn’t careful, she’d end up with a target on her back from every other organization out there as she followed her need for revenge…

In a way, Ballerina was an inevitability. Ana de Armas already proved herself to be a capable and compelling action heroine with her role (for one solid scene) in No Time to Die. She stole the show there, with everyone (this reviewer included) commenting that she should have been in more of the movie, and she should have gotten her own spin-off as well. While she didn’t (as of yet) get that James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. spin-off, she did get a different one here, and she handles herself remarkably well.

The fact is that de Armas is great in this role. She is more than up to the challenge of the action sequences this film throws at her, being fierce and aggressive and dangerous in proper measure. She’s a smaller woman than Wick, which the film makes sure to emphasize (even before we get to an inevitable fight between the two) and she has to find different ways to handle her battles. But de Armas never makes you think that Eve isn’t up to the task. She might be smaller, and technically weaker than the larger (predominantly male) foes she takes on, but you never doubt for a second that her character can’t fulfill her quest. She’s meant to be an action star, clearly.

But de Armas also brings emotion and vulnerability to her role that Reeves couldn’t with Wick. The Baba Yaga is a serious, almost dour performance (even if the first film in the series found ways to insert humor around Wick’s increasingly outlandish situations), but Eve isn’t the same kind of character. But might have to be focused and serious at times, but she’s also able to be open, kind, and caring in ways that make her more than just some Wick clone. She’s not the same character, and even if she’s doing similar tasks to Wick, living in the same world, meeting the same people, the actress finds many ways to set herself apart from Reeves’s performance.

Ballerina also has another inevitability baked into it: director Len Wiseman, who really seems to have a thing for female action heroes dressed all in black. The director became famous for his Underworld franchise, because female action vampires dressed all in black leather are inherently cool, and it doesn’t feel like he’s really moved on from there. Unfortunately his weaknesses are just as prevalent as his strengths in this film. While he’s great at focusing on female action heroines and getting good emotion out of them, which I’ll credit here as well, he’s not so good at focusing on much else. While this is Eve’s show, and she gets all the best scenes and best parts, the film seems almost bored any time it can’t focus on her. Everyone else feels rote and underdeveloped in this film, simple tropes and cookie cutter characters trotted out to fill the movie with background players.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the Chancellor. He’s the overbearing grandfatherly figure who controls the evil organization and keeps all the pieces moving. He’s filling the exact same role that Viktor, the vampire master, filled in Underworld, and he basically has just as much to do here. He postures, he looks menacing, but he really has little bearing on the film except to act as a target for Eve to shoot. There likely could be a version of this movie where we viewed the Chancellor as an interesting and involving villain that we loved to hate, but Wiseman’s take on the material never finds that sweet spot for the character (and never even tries). He’s just a guy that needs to die because Eve wants him dead. That’s all there is to it.

Now it’s entirely possible that the film we got in theaters could have been even worse. Reportedly after the initial production ended, series supervisor and director of all four previous John Wick films, Chad Stahelski, was called in to do reshoots. How extensive those reshoots may have been, and how much of the film he reworked, hasn’t been reported, but it’s likely that most of the action sequences were redone under Stahelski’s watchful eye. He’s the series mastermind and he knows how the action of the franchise should look. And, yes, the action sequences in this film are great. They’re kinetic and appropriately brutal, giving us everything we really want, deep down, from a John Wick film. However much he did, likely it saved this film because, at the very least, it paired up the very compelling actress, de Armas, with action worth her time and effort.

All of this leads up to an action movie that holds up pretty well but, maybe, could have been better. I think having a more competent director than Wiseman in the chair would have been good, but there’s no going wrong with de Armas doing her level best with crunchy action. The film delivers where it counts, both as a showcase for the actress and for the franchise’s proper brand of action. It’s not the best John Wick film around, since the first movie continues to stand as the series top tier best, but it certainly does rise to the occasion. At the very least it makes me hopefully for more Ballerina films in the future because, damn, de Armas can really kick ass.