Len Wiseman’s blood-and-guts John Wick spin-off features Ana de Armas as a ballet dancer turned assassin, fleeting glimpses of Keanu Reeves – and no sense of humour
For a film that includes an extended flamethrower battle, numerous supporting cast members barbecued until they look like overcooked pork scratchings, and so many exploding heads you stop counting after the 10th or so, Ballerina is a decidedly lukewarm addition to the John Wick series. A standalone picture that slots into the timeline somewhere between the events of 2019’s John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and Chapter 4 (2023), Ballerina follows Ana de Armas’s Eve, a newly minted graduate from the Ruska Roma ballet school, which also teaches extravagantly baroque murder techniques. There’s fresh blood behind the camera as well as in front, with Underworld director Len Wiseman filling the shoes of Wick series regular, stunt choreographer turned director Chad Stahelski. And although John Wick (Keanu Reeves) himself makes an appearance in this latest picture, he’s relegated to underpowered and underused supporting character status – a decision that throws the film’s many shortcomings into sharp relief.
At least de Armas gives it her all as an action star. Having cut her teeth in the genre with a memorable supporting role opposite Daniel Craig’s Bond in No Time to Die, she’s lithe and deadly as the trainee who realises her potential once she learns to “fight like a girl” (cue plenty of emphatically delivered testicle trauma). Eve is a gifted assassin who immediately takes to her career as a “kikimora” (like Wick’s “Baba Yaga” nickname, the word is rooted in Slavic folklore and, in the Wick universe at least, its meaning boils down to a purveyor of mass slaughter). But what makes Eve great as a hired killer – the unresolved pain of witnessing her father gunned down by a hit squad – also makes her unpredictable and emotional.
It’s not surprising that Eve is damaged. An introductory prelude shows her as a child in a lakeside villa furnished entirely with coloured smoke grenades, weapons and the kind of rickety antique occasional tables that seem specifically designed to be smashed dramatically during fight sequences.
Sure enough, a band of bad guys soon arrive, all bearing a distinctive scarred X on their wrists. Their leader, the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), demands that Eve be handed over, but Eve’s father decides to take the scorched-earth option, blowing up his prime lakeside real estate but dying in the process. Twelve years later, when Eve spots the same scarred mark on the arm of a man who attempts to kill her with his car, she defies the orders of Ruska Roma head honcho, the Director (Anjelica Huston), to find out the truth about the shadowy organisation that killed her dad.
Eve’s foe is an Aryan-looking killing machine with a head shaped like a Weetabix
And there you have it. A grievance, the desire for vengeance, slick fight choreography and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sharp-suited henchpeople to be creatively dispatched: the basic ingredients of every Wick movie so far. The problem is that the best of the Wick pics – and for me, Chapter 4 is the standout – go far beyond the basics. The action here is polished, but without the spark of crazed inventiveness that characterises the series at its best, Ballerina feels like a numbing production line of death. And while Armas is focused and physically committed, she struggles, in the absence of any depth in Eve, to persuade us to care.
The main issue, though, is the total lack of humour. The top-drawer Wick films work because they fully acknowledge their own absurdity and lean into the cartoonish qualities of the characters. Ballerina, however, takes itself dispiritingly seriously. Like any style-over-substance action movie, it depends on the quality of its antagonist. Chapter 4 delivered two of Wick’s most enjoyable foes in Scott Adkins’s monstrous, metal-toothed Killa and Donnie Yen as the breezily nonchalant blind assassin Caine. Here, Eve has to make do with a nameless, Aryan-looking killing machine with an incendiary device and a head shaped like a Weetabix (and the same range of facial expressions). Then there’s murder cult leader the Chancellor, whose weapon of choice is a public address system through which he instructs his lackeys to do his fighting for him.
Even the admittedly amusing idea of a chintzy, chocolate-box Alpine village as the secret hideout for a multigenerational community of ruthless professional killers isn’t as much fun as it should be. It does, however, provide the opportunity for some incongruously jolly, knee-slapping Tyrolean accordion music on the soundtrack, a brief respite from the relentlessly generic action score.
Rather optimistically, Ballerina lays the foundations for a sequel in its closing scenes. But on the evidence of this joyless slog, perhaps it’s time to let John Wick and all his acolytes finally rest in peace.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (125 mins, 15) is directed by Len Wiseman and stars Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Anjelica Huston
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