What do you get when you make a John Wick movie without the titular star at the forefront of the action? As it turns out, you still get a wildly entertaining experience with the action you’d come to expect from the films within the World of John Wick. Regardless of whatever the overarching title will be to hold all of these spinoffs together, following the John Wick Tetralogy. Ballerina stands as a quality proof of concept that there’s more life to be found in this assassin world under The High Table, without the necessity of our favorite long-haired, suit-wearing beagle lover to carry the weight of the franchise.
Ballerina acts as an origin story of sorts, following the life of Eve (Ana de Armas) as she enters the Ruska Roma family, headed by The Director (Anjelica Huston), and seeks revenge for the murder of her father. His death was at the hands of a deadly and mysterious cult, headed by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). Now that she’s had the training of an assassin—but never did learn how to pirouette like a proper ballerina, so how much of a threat can she really be, even without toenails—Eve is out for blood to kill the man who killed her father…also John Wick is around occasionally.
If there’s a fictional world that lends itself to spin-offs, it’s the world of John Wick. At a certain point, the world became the series’ main character, and Wick was just the weathered observer who traversed through it. Ballerina operates much the same way and acts as a new window into the world. Until this point, we’ve only ever seen it from the point of view of a veteran who's lived in and maneuvered through this world that he’s spent so many years trying to distance himself from. In Ballerina, we get to see what it’s like for someone to experience it and grow within the world. Many have compared the secret assassin society of John Wick to Harry Potter, albeit with more guns, cool tattoos, and polite customer service representatives for people who work for branches of the Continental. That’s still the case here, and it’s neat to see the upward trajectory of an assassin’s career, down to getting to see missions where Eve has to go out and kill people and protect others. We also can't fail to acknowledge that Eve's ballerina toy plays Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, while the Harry Potter song, Hedwig's Theme, is nearly indistinguishable from the classically orchestrated Tchaikovsky's melody.
That seems like such an obvious idea, but we’ve never gotten to really see that in these movies, and it’s a straightforward and fun excuse to have awesome action set pieces. Not only that, but we also get more world-building about how everything operates, down to the fact that not only are there families and organizations that work underneath The High Table, there are also cults that operate outside its control, and the one that Eve goes against in this film is such a threat that even Winston (Ian McShane) is intimidated by them.
What’s also a nice change of pace is that Eve isn’t a perfect assassin. They could’ve easily made her the new John Wick, where she’s immediately flawless and at the top of her class during training, but they didn’t do that. She takes a beating during her training, and she’s shown making a deliberate effort to get better based on the impediments she faces. When she goes on her first mission, she takes almost as many hits as she dishes out, showing that she still has a lot to learn but is driven to get the job done and ultimately grow as a fighter. Her mission also takes place in an ice-themed nightclub, perpetuating the theme in these movies that shootouts and brawls in nightclubs are commonplace in the John Wick world and don’t even warrant a second glance from club patrons. Maybe that’s how it is in real-world nightclubs, too.
Even when the film progresses and Eve is in full revenge mode, the movie never treats her like she’s the ultimate killing machine. She stumbles, and people occasionally get the better of her, but that gives the scenes more tension. You get the idea that she might be over her head and that she could lose the upper hand at any point, which makes it more vindicating when she clears house. Besides this being the best Black Widow movie we never got—oh, wait—it’s also cool to watch Eve grow from a timid student to a confident badass.
And yeah, the action hasn’t missed a beat. There’s plenty of hand-to-hand fighting, a lot of gun-fu, and several set pieces where the action revolves around a specific weapon. The last movie had John Wick with nunchucks, this time it’s Eve with grenades, and then later a flamethrower, making a bunch of goons exit the movie the same way Mikey Madison does in any movie where she doesn’t win an Oscar (if you know, you know).
The one gripe about this movie—and it is minor—is John Wick’s involvement in the third act. Up until that point, the movie operated sort of like Deadpool & Wolverine or Spiderman: No Way Home, where the story was working, even before meal ticket element entered the picture, but whereas in those movies, the added involvement of fan favorite characters elevated the story, this felt more like a last minute addition, almost as if the filmmakers didn’t have faith that this could operate as a complete standalone movie. Keanu Reeves makes everything better, he’s still perfect in the role, and it was neat to see him from the point of view of someone he’s going to kill—it made him scary when he makes it clear he could kill her at any time, he’s just choosing not to—but if you take him out, the story wouldn’t lose much. Maybe his involvement was so we could get the Knock Knock reunion everyone’s been clamoring for.
Ballerina is a solid first outing to see if the John Wick franchise has legs without its titular character. The Continental on Peacock was technically the official first try, but please raise your hand if you’ve even seen so much as the first episode…exactly. The film plays as an entertaining smaller story that occurs within a larger world and never operates as if it’s trying to have largescale stakes, which brings it back closer in scope to the original John Wick film—actually, Chapter 2 would probably be a more apt comparison—and, for the most part, it works as a standalone adventure, even if you aren’t familiar with the franchise. It’s fun, briskly paced, and is helmed excellently by Ana de Armas’ performance and physicality.