Ballerina review: Ana de Armas fights her way to an entertaining action flick

The John Wick franchise has become one of the most popular and successful action franchises of the last decade, with the titular assassin turning into an iconic role for Keanu Reeves. With Ballerina (official title From the World of John Wick: Ballerina), for the first time we get to see this world on the big screen from another character’s perspective, a young assassin named Eve played by Ana de Armas (in actuality this is the second John Wick spinoff, though The Continental was a TV series).

The result: thanks to action sequences that are similarly creative and well choreographed as ones from John Wick and a solid performance from de Armas, Ballerina punches, kicks and shoots its way to being an entertaining movie, even as its story and antagonists are just barely passable.

Ballerina takes place between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4. It focuses on Eve, who has been training with the Ruska Roma tribe, led by Anjelica Huston’s The Director, since she was a child after her father was murdered by a secretive and dangerous cult. Once her training is complete, Eve seeks out the cult to avenge her father’s death.

It’s the basic formula that got the John Wick franchise going, where a trained killer is driven by a deep personal desire for revenge. However, what is different is that John Wick began with a simple plot and target for Wick’s (and the audiences’) anger. Ballerina, on the other hand, attempts to drop us deep into a complicated history, but one that is not nearly developed enough to be fully satisfying.

But before I get more into that, let’s start off with the positive, because despite any of its flaws, John Wick and action movies fans are going to have a blast with Ballerina. Director Len Wiseman has handled big action movies before with the likes of Underworld, Live Free or Die Hard and Total Recall (2012), and he adeptly meets expectations with the fight scenes here.

A big part of the draw of the John Wick movies are the creative ways that Wick has to dispatch enemies (see our list of the best John Wick kills for examples). Eve gets to a slew of her own ridiculous kills, with some memorable fights involving a TV remote, dinner plates and a flamethrower. The fight scenes are what really make this movie work.

At least some credit for that has to go to de Armas. She’s already proved she has the action chops in movies like No Time to Die and Ghosted, but she raises her physical game up for Ballerina and it pays off. Her actual acting, meanwhile, carries the movie perfectly well; she may not have the most emotionally challenging role, but she gives Eve an intensity and drive that make her a character that’s easy to follow on this journey.

All that is enough to make Ballerina a fun watch. What keeps it from being great, though, is everything else around the action is half-baked, particularly the lore and threat of the villains at its center.

We’re told that the movie's villains are a dangerous, evil group, but what we get doesn’t live up to the hype. They’re a well-armed enemy for Eve to take on, for sure, but evil? The movie sets up so much with this group and then completely drops the ball in paying any of it off. Then when they try pay something off, they don’t let it have any real impact.

It’s similar with the main theme of the movie, which centers around whether or not life is determined by fate or if we actually make choices. That idea is brought up constantly, but it’s just words, it’s not effectively developed or presented as a strong moral quandary for Eve.

You may be asking do the main John Wick movies really have any deep themes? I would say yes. The first movie deals with grief, and then the subsequent sequels primarily focus on Wick trying to reconcile with his desire to leave his life of violence behind, but the only way to do that is by enacting more violence. Ballerina is trying to work in that same area, but it doesn’t do it nearly as well.

Yet that did not deter my ultimate enjoyment of Ballerina. In terms of butt-kicking, Ballerina is everything you could want from an action movie. That’s enough in this case.

Ballerina premieres exclusively in movie theaters worldwide on June 6.