Ballerina (2025)

Score: 3 / 5

It's difficult to review a film you barely remember. I spent the summer mostly without internet access, taking notes on movies and leaving them until I returned home. The problem is that I didn't take many notes on Ballerina, the spin-off with the unfortunate subtitle "From the World of John Wick," and now specifics of the film are difficult to recall. Yet, as I lament my shortsighted notetaking, I also wonder if that in itself is indicative of my feelings about the film.

For most of the film's first third or so, my notes are essentially nothing more than "worldbuilding, character (re)introductions, and placement in the franchise." Eve Macarro is the titular dancer, daughter of two assassins affiliated with a new crime family called the Cult, led by its Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). Her father had taken her from the Cult to deliver her to his own syndicate, the Ruska Roma, led by the Director (Angelica Huston), which resulted in the Cult murdering her parents. She agrees to become a ballerina and assassin, and trains for twelve years under her Director's punishing, matronly watch. We see John Wick (Keanu Reeves) during his meeting with the Director (an event from John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum), placing the subsequent events of this film between that and Chapter 4; as a personal note, I don't fully understand this, as chapters 3 and 4 otherwise feel quite nicely subsequent, but perhaps it doesn't matter overmuch. Wick advises Eve to abandon this life, but she persists and becomes "Kikimora" (much as he became "Baba Yaga") shortly thereafter upon successfully completing her first mission. She inquires about the Cult, but is forbidden from learning more or hunting them by her Director, due to a tenuous truce between them.

Ana de Armas performs well enough in the lead role, offering more physical prowess than I expected of her, despite some genuinely obnoxious dialogue that beats you over the head with thematic points, but the action simply isn't up to snuff with the rest of the series. Perhaps that's unfair; the action may be rigorous and precise, but it's presented to haphazardly that it's almost impossible to follow. Whereas the other films have featured crisp, calculated cinematography and long takes meant to dance around the action as if we're present with it, Ballerina is shot and edited like... well, like a rudimentary action film, with unnecessary and distracting cuts between each fighting beat, dim lighting and distant lenses that make sure we know where we are spatially but often obscure the action itself. Especially in the first third, the action is sorely disappointing. It does improve slightly by the midpoint, when Eve chooses to pursue vengeance on the Cult for her father; it's perhaps to be expected that in a franchise about revenge, this entry finally finds its footing when its character chooses to seek revenge.

Though it still never reaches the high points of Chad Stahelski's films, Ballerina does improve significantly in its latter half, when Eve meets the Chancellor's son (Norman Reedus, who is woefully underused here) at the Prague Continental, who helps point her to his estranged father and asks her to help him hide his daughter from the Cult. After this, the final third of the film is essentially one long action sequence, as Eve finds, infiltrates, and attempts to utterly destroy the Cult's compound in a snowy Austrian hamlet. This is, finally, when the film feels like an earnest attempt to join the franchise, as its bonkers, often silly action is never less than entertaining and engrossing, even though it's never presented with the finesse or polish of Stahelski's fever dreams. Unpretentious and fun, its serviceable thrills worked well enough for me that I stopped taking my brief notes to just enjoy the wacky nonsense. I did note, once, that her enemies are pretty shockingly stupid, often running into clear danger without seemingly being aware that they're asking to be shot or stabbed or blown up. 

So if the film is saying that Eve is a skilled assassin because her foes are blundering, oafish men, I'm not sure this adds much to either the world of John Wick or the representation of women in action films (Atomic Blonde will remain my platinum standard, thank you very much). After all, Reeves returns for the climax in a much larger capacity than I expected or even wanted, as if the filmmakers knew he had to be involved in order to legitimize the mess they were creating. But if it's simply adding color and shape to the dynamics of this stylish world of syndicate-officiated violence and providing images of lesser assassins with entire European villages hellbent on her demise as she attempts to burn it all to ash, then I guess Ballerina does eventually provide enough to recommend itself to any fans.