‘Ballerina’ Review: A ‘John Wick’ Spinoff with Thrills but No Mythology of Its Own

One of the things that lifts a John Wick movie above a mere revenge flick is the way it drops you into a well-established world full of rules and consequences. So it’s only natural that spinoffs expounding upon things happening at the margins of John Wick’s smackdowns—like the machinations of the Continental Hotel (see, or rather don’t see, Peacock’s The Continental)—were greenlit to capitalize on the success of the series.

Of all the fertile ideas turned out by the John Wick movies, on the top of the list of those worthy of expansion is surely Halle Berry’s Sofia Al-Azwar and her testicle-ripping pair of Belgian Malinois. As for Anjelica Huston’s terse underworld queen the Director and the ballerinas, among others, that she trains in the assassin traditions of the Ruska Roma, well, given how Len Wiseman’s Ballerina is anything but a deep dive into that corner of the John Wick universe, you could take that as a tacit admission that no one was really clamoring for this spinoff.

Of course, we already knew that, what with screenwriter Shay Hatten’s Black List script having been retrofitted into the John Wick universe before John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum went into production. And, unfortunately, it shows, as all the John Wick elements of the film jut awkwardly from the plot every time they come into play, distracting from the work Ballerina has to do to establish its own identity. Sans a mythology of its own, or any substantive ties into where the John Wick films go chronologically after this, Ballerina is just another 87Eleven joint.

For what it’s worth, that still specifically entails more wildly inventive gunfights and hand-to-hand combat. And even by John Wick standards, there are a few unforgettable tricks up Ballerina’s sleeve, including what can only be described as a flamethrower duel. Wiseman is at least carrying the John Wick series’s torch with pride in that regard, with his staging skewing a little further toward the comedic without skimping on the visceral energy.

It also helps that Ana de Armas is more than capable of shouldering the lead role of Eva as an unstoppable killing machine without simply aping John Wick’s moves. During Eve’s training montage, her trainer, Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), tell her that she can’t brute force her way to victory, and that she must be more improvisational about the way she fights. There’s a certain flavor to the way she considers and takes down her enemies. Eve is smarter, angrier, even crueler than John Wick, and that’s a fact thrown into stark relief once Keanu Reeves’s Baba Yaga shows up and does, in fact, brute force his way to victory against Eve.

The aforementioned training montage, though, also draws attention to Ballerina’s failures, beginning with Nogi telling Eve to “fight like a girl.” Even if the series hadn’t presented us with female killing machines before now, that’s the film stating how behind the curve the story will be. Later, it also indulges in the cliché of Eve going rogue to avenge her father’s murder, thus making her another in a long line of female assassins defined by their daddy issues. It’s easy to imagine what could have been had the film spent less time tending to such clichés and a little more digging into the ins and outs of a training ground that makes assassins out of ballerinas.

There are some unique thrills later as Eve gets entangled with Norman Reedus’s grizzly antihero Daniel Pine and his daughter, Ella (Ava McCarthy), and the film transitions to a sort of loopy, ammosexual Wicker Man riff, with Eve being trapped in a pleasant European village controlled by the hissing patriarch of a death cult (Gabriel Byrne). But there’s still not much holding the film together. It’s all just obligatory noise between bullets firing.