In the neon-drenched, bullet-riddled cosmos of John Wick, where every shadow conceals a contract killer and every gold coin buys a body bag, a new star ascends to spin her own tale of vengeance. Ballerina: From the World of John Wick, introduces Ana de Armas as Eve Macarro, a ballerina-assassin trained in the Ruska Roma’s peculiar academy of dance and death. De Armas, with her luminous presence and lethal grace, is the film’s pulsing heart, a vision of ferocity and finesse who commands the screen as if she were born to wield both a tutu and a tommy gun.
Whether she’s dispatching goons with a pair of ice skates repurposed as nunchucks or facing down a flamethrower-wielding brute in a climax that feels like a fever dream of Michael Bay’s excesses, de Armas is electrifying. She moves with a scrappy, strategic ferocity, distinct from Keanu Reeves’s stoic precision as John Wick, embodying the film’s mantra to “fight like a girl” with a blend of guile and grit. Her beauty, too, is a weapon: her wide, expressive eyes convey a haunted rage, a flicker of the orphaned girl beneath the assassin’s armour. In a franchise that often fetishizes its violence, de Armas brings a flicker of humanity, a pulse of emotional truth that makes Eve more than just a killing machine.
Yet, for all de Armas’s brilliance, the film around her feels like a lesser shadow of its predecessors. The plot is a threadbare tapestry of vengeance, stitched together from scraps of the John Wick template. Eve, orphaned after her father’s murder by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, underused and underwhelming), is taken in by the Ruska Roma, trained by the stern Director (Anjelica Huston), and set on a path to slaughter those who wronged her. It’s a story we’ve seen before, not just in John Wick but in countless revenge flicks from Kill Bill to La Femme Nikita. The script, weighed down by expository dialogue and half-baked subplots, lacks the lean elegance of the original John Wick, which knew its simplicity was its strength. Ballerina tries to expand the Wick-verse’s mythology but ends up tangled in its own lore, with references to the Continental and the Ruska Roma feeling more like brand obligations than organic storytelling.
The film’s very existence raises a question that Barry Norman, with his rapier wit and skeptic’s eye, might have skewered: why does this need to be? The John Wick series, now four films deep and grossing over a billion dollars, has already stretched its premise thin, its once-fresh world of bespoke assassins and arcane rules growing creaky with each sequel. Keanu Reeves’s cameo as John Wick, though brief, still overshadows Eve’s story, as if the filmmakers feared de Armas alone couldn’t carry the weight on her slender shoulders. The reshoots reportedly overseen by John Wick director Chad Stahelski only deepen the sense that Ballerina is a film caught between two masters—Wiseman’s pulpy instincts and the franchise’s rigid formula—resulting in a product that feels neither bold nor necessary.
Ironically the heart aches for what might have been. De Armas’s star turn here only sharpens the longing for a different kind of spin-off, built on her electrifying performance as Paloma in No Time to Die, where de Armas stole the show in a mere twelve minutes, her Cuban CIA agent a whirlwind of charm, wit, and lethal efficiency. Paloma was a revelation: playful yet deadly, her chemistry with Daniel Craig’s James Bond crackling with a platonic warmth that felt fresh in a franchise often mired in romantic clichés. A Paloma spin-off would have been a chance to explore a new corner of the Bond universe, one infused with de Armas’s infectious enthusiasm and physical prowess, unburdened by the John Wick series’ increasingly convoluted mythology. Instead, Ballerina, a film that, while showcasing de Armas’s action-hero credentials, traps her in a narrative that feels like a cover version of a song we’ve heard too many times.
The action, to be fair, is a saving grace. Wiseman, a veteran of Underworld and Live Free or Die Hard, delivers set pieces that are as inventive as they are absurd: Eve wielding a firehose, smashing plates over heads, or engaging in a flamethrower duel that defies all logic but dazzles the senses. Yet even these sequences, thrilling as they are, can’t fully compensate for the film’s narrative shortcomings. The ballet motif, promised by the title, is little more than a garnish, with Eve’s dance training barely informing her combat style or the story’s emotional core.
In the end, Ballerina is a paradox: a film elevated by Ana de Armas’s radiant, ruthless performance yet diminished by its rote plotting and questionable raison d’être. She proves she’s more than capable of leading an action franchise, her star power undimmed even as she’s battered by brutes and buried in clichés. But the film feels like a missed opportunity, a detour in a universe that’s already running low on fuel. Ballerina is a spectacle that satisfies in bursts but leaves one pining for a different dance entirely—one where Ana de Armas, unchained from this franchise’s baggage, could truly soar.