Alongside Christopher McQuarrie with his 4-film run on Mission Impossible, Chad Stahelski has, in the last 10 years, pretty much been *the* Hollywood action director, his four John Wick movies inspiring plenty of copycats, none of them living up to the real thing. Now, with spinoff Ballerina, we have our first Wick-verse film where he’s not the one in charge, with new director Len Wiseman taking the reins for an action side-quel that, though it does have some fun ideas and crunching fights, inevitably ends up looking like a rather pale imitation of its own franchise.
Though Keanu Reeves does appear in a spoiled-by-the-trailer but still highly enjoyable cameo as Wick, it’s Ana de Armas who takes centre stage here as newbie assassin and Ruska Roma ballerina Eve, graduating to full action star after stealing the show in her short-but-sweet stint in No Time To Die. She’s a capable lead, never quite as convincing in combat as Reeves is but still comfortable enough to sell all the high kicks and headshots a Wick film demands, even if her accent (like *everyone* in this movie, especially Gabriel Byrne as the villain) is all over the place. It would be nice if she had been given some more interesting material though.
If the mainline John Wick series was about an ultra-experienced assassin at the end of a storied career, Ballerina looks at how such a career might begin, and it makes for a much more generic central character, Eve hunting a mysterious cult that killed her father when she was a kid in a pretty interminable prologue. Veteran franchise writer Shay Hatten returns to script again here and while some of the more fun bits of Wick writing remain intact – most notably that every fourth person seems to be an assassin – the world here feels less rich, really missing the sense of history that John brought as a protagonist. There are also just some plot moves that, even by the standards of this openly ridiculous series, stand up to less than zero scrutiny.
Once the talking stops, things do get much more enjoyable (the action scenes were reportedly punched up by Stahelski himself). Eve is far less experienced and far more vulnerable than John ever was, so her fights are much more savage and much less fluid, though they do retain some of the dark humour of the main series. Wiseman’s battles have some great ideas in them, from a rubber-bullets-only shootout to a flamethrower-vs-flamethrower duel, though you could hardly compare them to the sheer levels of joy and imagination in John Wick 4, which, most crucially, had so many good ideas that none of them needed to outstay their welcome.
More so than the actual killing itself, though, which is still visceral fun, the visuals here are very lacklustre. The gorgeous lighting and campy design work of the main series did immense amounts of work in elevating Wick above its genre peers, but Ballerina is mostly just dark. As the rest of this review has shown, it’s easy to talk negatively about Ballerina, especially as the follow-up to the best-in-franchise and (I think) legitimate masterpiece that was John Wick 4, but being the worst of a great bunch can still mean that you’re often pretty good. The action is brutal and cleverly choreographed, it all moves at a decent pace (after the prologue, that is), and de Armas is a solid action star in the making, there’s just a Keanu Reeves/Chad Stahelski shaped hole here that proves very hard to fill.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
Good review. To me, I thought that this movie was pretty good. A bit slow in some parts and it does take similar cues from the John Wick films, but I felt that Armas was a strong enough lead and did fit well into the film’s larger universe.