Ballerina
Year: 2025
Rating: R
Length: 124 minutes / 2.07 hours
I can appreciate that the relatively new John Wick franchise feels that it already has enough lore to expand into spinoff territory. Ballerina (2025) attempts to expand on the classy, pseudo-religious world of organized crime families by focusing on someone other than John Wick (Keanu Reeves) for once. And while its execution doesn’t feel terribly original with some of the tropes it chose, Ballerina is still a fun action film that relies on fantastic stunt work, just like the other four movies in the John Wick franchise.
While Wick can usually just muddle through all the violence he has to endure to achieve his goals, Eve (Ana de Armas) needs to be smarter with her engagements. While there’s sexism in the message that she’ll never be physically strong enough to subdue her targets, it feels fresher having the action be more about her speed and agility (because of course female assassins are all dancers). Still, she encounters the problem that even if she can dodge hits, if her enemy makes contact with her body, she’ll get hurt a lot more. But in a franchise that also seems to be about weapons more than hand-to-hand combat, it’s odd they didn’t lean further into giving her weapon skills.
Perhaps the one aspect that could have been improved was where this movie fits into the John Wick timeline. I would almost have preferred to see Wick in his prime as a killing machine going after Eve and providing a significant threat to her safety. A prequel also would have given a seed to Wick’s eventual retirement (and the whole point of his four movies). As it stands, it’s just kind of there, adjacent to everything else that’s happening. Thus: spin-off.
An adequate spin-off for the John Wick franchise, I give Ballerina 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
