Movie Review: Ballerina
I think if you surveyed anyone who saw the first John Wick film back in 2014, there wouldn’t have been a whole lot of people who thought this would become a franchise of four movies and a spin-off. The film, which grossed a modest but respectable $43 million at the box office and received solid critical reviews, became a word-of-mouth hit and an immediate cult sensation, reviving Keanu Reeves’ career and creating a franchise that grew in scale and story, and became more successful with each subsequent sequel.
From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is the franchise’s first spin-off movie and stars Ana de Armas as our new seemingly-immortal assassin. A spin-off within the John Wick universe sounds like a good idea on paper, as the Wick films did a great job of expanding the universe with every movie. They introduced us to new layers of the world John Wick was entangled in. There were several directions a spin-off could have gone. It could have dove deeper into the operations of The Continental, a global hotel chain where assassins can stay without worry of harm. They could have explored some of the side characters we’ve met along the way. Or introduce us to someone completely new who lives within this world and has their own plot and story.
Ballerina opted for the last option, sort of. de Armas plays Eve, a woman raised by the Ruska Roma, the Russian syndicate that produces ballerinas and assassins led by The Director, played by Anjelica Houston, after her father was murdered in front of her eyes by The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) and his cult. Unlike the John Wick movies, where we learn more about Wick’s past the more the movies go on, Ballerina goes a more conventional route and shows us the death of Eve’s father, her training with the Ruska Roma, her first mission, and the mission where she finds a connection that could lead her to the people that killed her father. This takes Eve on a globe-trotting mission to find The Chancellor, despite not getting approval from The Director and jeopardizing a historical agreement between The Chancellor and the Ruska Roma.
While the revenge tale fits nicely within the John Wick universe, Ballerina stumbles in two key areas. The first is the plot gets too big for this character. Eve is new to the assassin game. When we meet her, she’s still in training. During her first mission where she is protecting the daughter of a wealthy businessman, she does her job but gets her ass kicked along the way. Her fighting style isn’t fully developed, and there is still a lot to learn. Eve’s mission to find The Chancellor takes place only two months after her first mission, yet she’s ready to take on an entire town of The Chancellor’s cult? I know these movies aren’t supposed to be realistic, but this was a leap I couldn’t get behind. The events of Ballerina feel like two or three films smashed into one. If the story arc of Eve learning to be an assassin and trying to find the man who killed her father were spread out over time so we could see Eve’s development as an assassin and the internal battle between vengeance and doing a job, while also diving into the mystery of where The Chancellor is it would have made for a better first film and an interesting film series.
The second stumble, and the biggest, is that Ballerina knows it lives in a John Wick universe and knows it will not be as good as the John Wick films. Reeves reprises his role as Wick and we first seem in early in the film visiting the Ruska Roma and The Director, an event that took place in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. Eve stops Wick on his way out and he gives her advice about breaking free from the Ruska Roma If this was his only scene in the movie, it would have been powerful and more effecting to the story of Eve.
However, Wick shows up again in the film’s final and actually has a major part in the events that take place. Most of the final set piece, where Eve is making her final push to The Chancellor while taking out his entire snow-covered village, has Wick show up and essentially steal the show. He gets an action sequence that is arguably better than any of the sequences de Armas goes through in the film and there is even a moment where he saves Eve from certain death. It’s like Ballerina was too scared to make a movie without John Wick being a part of it in a major way, so much so that it has him save our new assassin. It felt like a copout and disrespectful to de Armas and the character of Eve, as if she couldn’t complete her mission without Wick. It really brings down the whole idea of the movie and makes you question its existence. Why make a John Wick spin-off movie with a new character and a new story if you’re still relying on John Wick to save the day?
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