From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)

Starring: Ana de Armas, Angelica Houston, Gabriel Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ava Joyce McCarthy, Norman Reedus, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, with Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Keanu Reeves
Director: Len Wiseman
Action Director: Caleb Spillyards, Jeremy Marinas, Anis Cheurfa

We have been getting female-centric movies about lady assassins, sleeper agents, and what have you for the past decade or so. From Anna to Red Sparrow to Gunpowder Milkshake to Protégé to...you get the point. There are a lot of them. Most of them are decent entertainment at best, although Kate was good because it felt unrestrained in its action and violence compared to most of its peers. Amidst all of these films and the gleeful lack of restraint of the John Wick films, it was an exciting endeavor to learn about Ballerina. The premise was elementary: John Wick 3 established that Angelica Houston's The Director ran a Russian ballet school in NYC that served as a front for training female assassins. Okay, so the writers just needed to create a character from that school whose story they could tell...with lots of action. I think we got even more excited when Ana de Armas was hired, considering that I've read a lot of reviews suggesting that her scenes in No Time to Die were the best in the movie. I'm not sure how we reacted to Len Wiseman being brought on as director: the Underworld films have more than its fair share of fans--the fact that all five films went to theaters is almost harder to believe than the fact that all six Resident Evil films did--but he hadn't done much of note since then. But with Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski working as producers, I'm sure they would help make sure he did the franchise justice.

And he did.

For the most part.

The movie opens with an attack on a large house by a bunch of a masked gunmen led by a man we'll later know as The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, of The End of Days and The Keep). Their target is a man, Javier (David Castañeda, of Sicario: Day of the Soldado), and his daughter, Eve. What little we gleam from their limited conversation while the bullets are flying is that Javier used to be party of The Chancellor's organization and left, prompting the latter to murder his wife. The Chancellor wants Eve, but Javier refuses to give her up. Lots of gunshots and explosions later, the man is dead and Eve is now an orphan. She is found at the police station by Winston (a returning Ian McShane), who offers to give her direction: that is, take her to the Ruska Roma to study under the tutelage of The Director. Eve accepts and begins her training, both as a ballerina and an assassin. Whereas John Wick was the Baba Yaga (the Slavic boogieman), the assassins of the Ruska Roma are known as Kikimora, another Slavic spirit that prey on lazy people (but who may be beneficial to kind-hearted people). I would like for every John Wick Universe film to make some obscure folklore reference to the killer in question ("Caine is an incarnation of War Deity Jiutian Xuannü, except that he has a penis").

Twelve years later, Eve has grown up and is completing her studies in ballet, martial arts, and gunplay. After a chance meeting with John Wick (this scene is set parallel to John Wick 3), she decides she is ready to start taking on work. After a handful of successful jobs, she is attacked while leaving a nightclub by an unknown assailant. She manages to kill him, only to notice that the tattoo on his wrist is the same as the gunmen from the beginning. This is where we start learning about their identity: they are a Death Cult that work outside of the jurisdiction of the High Table. They kill people for business and for sport--the motivations of the attack on Eve outside the club go unexplained, so I wonder if they were just following random killers--the John Wick Universe suggests that half the population of NYC are killers-for-hire--and attacked her when convenient. Eve goes to see Winston who warns her to stay way from the Cult, but realizing how determined she is, points her in the direction of a member who happens to be staying at the Prague branch of the Continental.

Eve flies to Prague against the wishes of the Director and checks in at the Continental. There she learns that the guest is fleeing from the Cult with his young daughter, Ella (Ava Joyce McCarthy). What Eve doesn't realize is that almost everybody in the lobby of the Continental either works for the Cult (headed by Lena, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno) or is waiting for them to up the bounty enough that they'd be willing to break Continental rules and kill the guy. All hell breaks loose in the Continental and the girl ends up getting kidnapped. Eve eventually learns that they are hiding out in the mountains of eastern Austria (or western Hungary) and heads out there in search of the Chancellor...

Like most of the other John Wick films, this movie has lots of ideas that it doesn't explore very much because it needs to get to the next action set piece. We learn a little bit more about how the Ruska Roma functions, which straddles the line between outright cruelty and surprising mercy. I also like how the film sets us up for this maudlin tale of an assassin traveling with a little girl and discovering her humanity through her interaction with her...only to subvert that by having the girl get immediately captured and Eve focus on the administering of death to her foes. No forced emotions and audience manipulation here, people!

The Death Cult is a neat idea, especially when we learn that it is a community of former assassins and mercenaries who a) have embraced their killer heritage and b) wanted to settle down and have families. There are scattered images throughout the scenes there that suggest the assassin philosophy is ingrained in children from a very young age. That means that when Eve reaches her destination, she'll literally have an entire city trying to kill her. Sadly, the film fails to address the moral implications of what exactly it means for Eve to kill so many people in those last 40 minutes or so.

Speaking of killing, the movie has the requisite number of set pieces that you would expect from a John Wick movie. The main fight choreographer is Caleb Spillyards, who has done a lot of stuntwork on both Marvel and DC films. Most recently, he choreographed the fight scenes to Thunderbolts*. He is joined by Jeremy Marinas (The Beekeeper) and Anis Cheurfa, another veteran of numerous superhero films and the earlier John Wick movies. The fight sequences and gun-fu set pieces are of the general standard set by the other JW movies. The movie establishes early on that men are naturally physically superior to Eve, so she'll have to learn how to cheat and fight dirty. What that means is that she has to use a lot more weapons--pipes, knives, axes (which reminds me of the Hitman 3 game), ice skates, etc.--then straight-up fisticuffs. Even though I'm not a stickler to it like many mainstream movie critics these days are, I'm glad that the film brought up that point. There is your requisite judo and jiu-jitsu, and even some Taekwondo from a group of Korean gangsters in Eve's first job.

There are two big gimmick-y action sequences, which we have come to expect from these movies at least since John Wick 3. The first one is what I can only describe as "close-quarters combat with hand grenades." People who cannot suspend disbelief will surely call shenanigans on this scene, especially since Eve walks away with very little damage to her body. Then there is the climax, which is a huge gunfight...but with DUELING FLAMETHROWERS. We haven't seen this much carnage and awesomeness involving flamethrowers since Aliens. John Wick also shows up right before the climax and gets to have a one-on-one judo fight with Ana de Armas. Any damage he does to her is surely payback for whatever torture she inflicted on him in Knock Knock.

I need to watch Kate again, but as far as I'm concerned, this is the best Hollywood femme fatale action-opus since things kicked off with Salt. I enjoyed this quite a bit and am looking forward to the next spin-off: Caine.