Ballerina 2025

dir: Len Wiseman

2025

I’m calling this film Ballerina 2025 to differentiate it from the South Korean action film Ballerina from a couple of years ago, because calling it its full title of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is just too embarrassing except to the kinds of people who live to work in marketing. To them such a title is sweeter than crack.

The only other thing it has in common with the South Korean film from 2023 is that the film is not about a ballerina at all: that flick was about a depressed super assassin who wanted revenge against a jerk who sexually abused her only friend, leading to hundreds of deaths. This flick is about a pretend ballerina who’s really a super assassin who wants revenge on the guy who killed her father, leading to hundreds of deaths.

It is unashamedly a John Wick flick that doesn’t have John Wick as the lead that still, thanks to situating it temporarily between the 3rd and 4th movies, still has John fucking Wick in it. You know, as someone who saw the other 4 movies, I did wonder if he killed enough people back then.

Now he’s killed even more. It’s an excellent cheat. Despite the results of the 4th film in his franchise, he could be killing more people for all eternity. So what if he killed over 400 people over the course of those four flicks – he can always beat his highest score.

I don’t know if this flick was successful money-wise guaranteeing more films where someone who’s not a ballerina kills hundreds more people, but there is something to be said for a flick that illuminates / betrays the emptiness of its central conceit: It was always absurd that one person could kill literally hundreds of people at a time. And now, with even less justification, the mayhem continues, like she’s a one person IDF, mowing down countless Palestinians…

Numbers. It comes down to numbers. If the mainstay attraction of those films is a main character killing hundreds of people, then I guess a film where the protagonist maims dozens of people but only kills the main bad guy would be considered a failure. Never fear, she probably kills, I dunno, 30, 40 people here? She gets to roast a bunch of them, but also stab and shoot a whole bunch of them too.

And she does it really well. Ana de Armas is blessed with being a performer who is often as good as the film she’s in (like her roles in No Time to Die, or Knives Out), and often she puts in a better performance than the film deserves (The Gray Man, Ghosted, Dark Waters, Blonde). She’s pretty great.

She’s solid in this role, but this role requires someone to do some choreography and look cool reloading guns while sometimes stabbing and punching someone in the same sequence. There are some solidly put together action sequences here, and up until the moments where the scene is handed off to a stunt person, she acquits herself really well.

Unlike the stoic Wick stoically and somewhat reluctantly mowing down legions of nobodies, Eve, as her character is called, looks like she’s having a hard and agonising time of it.

During the long montage training sequence in the early part of the film, her mentor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) admonishes her for trying to fight like her opponents (larger men), and counsels her to seek alternative ways of attacking, playing to her own strengths and adapting her actions such that they won’t be anticipated, and she will kill them both by surprise and with additional skill. “Fight Like a Girl” she is told, name-checking Clementine Ford’s excellent book about contemporary feminism in Australia from about ten years ago.

From then on, within the continuing montage, everything improves for Eve. Her ballet pirouettes are finally en pointe, she bests all her opponents and she graduates to the next level of assassin-ness.

And then she entirely forgets that advice and just fights like everyone fights in these films: slap some around for a bit and then shoot this faceless nobody in the head, or stab them a bunch of times and then shoot them.

This all occurs, in case you didn’t know or forgot words from earlier, in the strange world of the Wick movies, where an alternate society (I always thought they had to be vampires) with all its arcane rules and procedures made up of assassins co-exists alongside ‘regular’ humanity. I mean, I assume that’s what it is, because otherwise the whole world is assassins or assassin-adjacent, in which case it’s a miracle there’s anyone left alive.

In this world, everyone from a beggar to a ballerina is really just an assassin, and their first loyalty is to their clan, be it run by the Beggar King or a ballet director, and then to the rules of the High Table.

And then there’s some other group of people who are terrible, grrr, the absolute worst, and no-one talks about them unless you ask nicely a number of times, and they’re led by The Chancellor, played by Gabriel Byrne, which is really dumb. All the unis I went to had vice-chancellors, and they weren’t the least bit scary, but I guess they’re going for the evil Third Reich vibe.

What’s funny to me is that when his ghoulish character is introduced, Gabriel Byrne, who is famously Irish, doesn’t use any particular accent when he’s telling a person why he’s about to die. But later in the flick when Eve is trying to kill him, his accent is all “we are invading the Sudetenland, schnell schnell!!!”

He is terrible as this character which doesn’t really matter, because his cult’s whole existence doesn’t matter and I dare anyone to care. In a world of assassins, these guys are another, wait for it, group of assassins with weapons and shit. What possible difference could any of it make? The second Eve arrives in their mostly Aryan town, somewhere in Austria, like we needed any more dog whistles, every person in the town tries to kill her, no matter what they were doing previously. But here’s the real twist – that’s not a twist. Most of the John Wick movies had everyone in public or on a train getting a phone message and trying to kill the unkillable thin guy in the distinctive suit, so seeing another whole group of people do the same thing hardly matters.

Before that she went to Prague because some guy has a scar / mark on his wrist, which, you know, is necessary to further the story along, but for a super secret cult of, I dunno, white surpremacists swan around with a distinctive marking is kinda contrary to the idea of being super secret and under the radar and all that.

“Oh I know! I’m going to start a secret hush hush cult, and no-one else will ever know we exist except we’ll all get a tattoo of Pepe the Frog on one cheek and Mr Squiggle on the other, so we can recognise one another! No-one else will ever know!!!”

They’re killers, with weapons, like all the other killers with weapons that populate these flicks. And then they’re gone, but that’s another story entirely. We see Eve’s childhood motivation being set when her dad is killed in front of her, but while I understand that she has nursed this trauma for decades in order to one day achieve her goal, it leads to some nonsense scenes whereby, by all rights, stacks of people could have killed her, or she could have delayed her plans by a couple of hours or days, but she just says “um, I gotta do this” as if it’s an explanation of anything.

Revenge is great, don’t get me wrong, but that blind grunting gnashing of teeth “I must kill him and die trying” thing feels pretty dumb in such an expensive movie. They again mock John Wick for kicking everything off over the death of his puppy, but that at least feels like a motivation. The machinations and motivations for anyone in this flick are absurd.

Speaking of which, yes, Keanu is in a whole slab of this flick, I would argue unnecessarily but then I enjoyed those scenes a lot. He still kills people but he doesn’t kill as many as usual, and especially doesn’t kill the one he’s meant to, the one his job was to kill, and the motivation for that makes little sense for a man who has killed more assassins than covid.

But not this cute assassin, no. She’s free to push the franchise in some other direction if they deem fit and if the money keeps rolling it. The character is non-existent beyond the look, but then you could say the same about the ultimate cipher that is John Wick, but she at least seems like she’s having fun playing it.

Just for something different, they invest heavily in flame throwers. You would be amazed to see how much time is devoted to flame throwers in this flick, and how many people she kills with them. They say a change is as good as a holiday sometimes, and it did amuse me somewhat to watch Eve roasting people’s chestnuts with a burst of fuel.

Sad and shocking to see Lance Reddick again playing Charon, which makes me wonder how far back some of this flick released a month ago was actually shot, since… since that wonderful man passed in March of 2023. Always lovely to see Winston / Ian McShane again, long may he reign at the Continental.

This wasn’t great, but it is well paced, and the slaughtering is well choreographed and doesn’t go to the absurd lengths of that last Wick film that was three hours of tedious butchery with occasional flashes of brilliance. This has less brilliance, but more restraint, and sometimes in these times of apocalyptic excess, that’s a good thing.

7 times let me guess in the next flick she kills even more people out of 10

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“Do you like to dance? I know a school where they teach dances. I could take you there if you like.” – sure, creepy uncle, you can take me anywhere - Ballerina