The John Wick movies, beyond their ultra-violent impulses, embrace their cinematic lineage as heirs to classic silent comedy (e.g. the works of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd). The joy of the series is the same: a deep understanding of precise choreography and contextual spatial design, serving as an honorary homage to some of cinema’s earliest stunt performers. When we watch Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd or Keanu Reeves, it’s like watching an intricate dance performance. They must use rhythm and movement to convey meaning. There is no time for words or interstitials. The body is the narrative delivery device and the set is their canvas, as the actors navigate shifting environments, they tell a story. What’s important is how they exist and move through these spaces with engineered precision — Buster Keaton narrowly avoids being crushed by falling cut-outs of a house (Steamboat Bill Jr., 1928), Harold Lloyd hangs precipitously from a clock tower (Safety Last!, 1923), Keanu Reeves waltzes through a maze of disorienting glass mirrors while reflections of his enemies move all around him (John Wick: Chapter 2, 2017) — you could describe their performances as nearly balletic.
Making a spin-off movie about a ballerina assassin is the most literalist reading of John Wick possible. Including a clip of the famous aforementioned scene of Steamboat Bill Jr. is, likewise, taking the brunt of these influences too literarily. Because these movies are doing that thing, but they are also tactically sound expressions of action combat cinema, reflecting not just these early origins of expressive stunt work, but also everything that transpired between silent comedies and Keanu Reeves getting revenge. Unless it’s explicitly John Wick, it’s hard to figure out what the need for a John Wick-adjacent project is. We already have perfectly fine versions of “John Wick at home” — see: Atomic Blonde (2017) and Nobody (2021), among dozens of others. A decade after the first entry, John Wick may be the most imitated series of our time, so any new off-shoot is either going to need to nail exactly what works about those movies or innovate the formula and make it new.
Ballerina just feels like another pale imitation of John Wick. Except. Except it has flashes of brilliance. It’s been said, but not enough, that Chad Stahelski’s direction of the John Wick movies is just an astounding understanding of the dimensions of movie spaces. They are, of course, brazen and free-flowing and action movies, but the genius is that they get to be that, and also intricately designed.
Direction has been passed off to Len Wiseman who did fine work on the Underworld films a long time ago and does sufficient work on Ballerina now. It takes a while, though, as the movie sputters along for a good while before it gets to any convincing set pieces. Whereas the John Wick movies are pacey and have a satisfying pattern of engagement between set pieces, Ballerina feels comparatively undesigned, landing occasionally on deeply-cool and John Wick-worthy moments, but not filling an entire film with them.
Ana De Armes takes up the mantle of lead character as Eve Macarro, ballerina turned assassin, as she’s brought in by Winston (Ian McShane) and The Director (Anjelica Houston, hell yeah women can smoke cigars in movies). Also of note are roles by Norman Reedus (who just makes a certain kind of sense in universe) and Lance Reddick (tragically in his last film role, already deeply missed). Ana De Armes is basically fun to watch, albeit doesn’t seem to be as intricately grounded in the world and her character is not as spatially realized through interesting sets, as the Baba Yaga himself. She does get some very fun gimmicky sequences though, which play with physical action comedy — most memorably a long segment where she blows up a series of grenades, clearing areas and opening up new spaces to move through, while using the environment to shield herself. But there also lots of gotcha moments, quick grisly kills shot for audience reactions, and they will come. These are the moments where Ballerina succeeds.
The rest of time, it’s not up to much. It feels like a lot of biding time, for a series that is most known for its propulsive movement and clean execution of action. Sure, there are fun moments, but it really does feel just like that — a movie comprised of high-intrigue moments, that never quite coalesce into any grander design. So many of them now seem to be done for the sake of fan service.
When Keanu Reeves finally shows up as John Wick in Ballerina, it’s treated as though it would be a big reveal of some kind. Ballerina takes place between John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) and John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023), so you get that reframed moment from the third movie, where they cross paths, just from a new perspective. Whatever. Lionsgate missed their shot, haven’t they, just as Universe movies have gone out of vogue — even for Marvel — this much delayed and fussed with universe-expander now feels like rote worldbuilding, which actually reduces and contracts the future of John Wick movies.
Which is all to say, there is nothing to recommend Ballerina over any of the previous movies, and even among the pack of John Wick imitations, it’s somewhere in the middle. It has moments where it would come out fairly high among the also-ran Wick movies, but given the sheer quantity of those that we now have, it feels superfluous at best. Still, bring on John Wick: Chapter 5. The series isn’t excommunicado just yet.