Ballerina
The John Wick franchise continues in female form but still boasts a massive body count, sensational stuntwork and lashings of style – if you like that sort of thing.
Fiery temperament: Ana de Armas
Photo by Murray Close, courtesy of Lionsgate.
There’s not a whole lot of ballet in Ballerina, anymore than there was in the horror film Abigail. We do get snatches of Swan Lake throughout, which shows just how imaginative this fifth edition in the John Wick franchise is. When Ian McShane’s Winston Scott first hears the melody of Eve’s beloved glass music box he purrs, “Tchaikovsky. How lovely.” No room for Dvorák then. Even so, much of the later action takes place in the Czech Republic and Dvorák is Czech. Of course, it’s winter and this secluded, lakeside corner of Bohemia could not look more picturesque, much like the rest of this visually seductive bloodbath. And, as Joan Wick – or Eve Macarro – Ana de Armas is not hard on the eyes either (although that doesn’t stop people from repeatedly trying to kill her).
Picture the scene: Eve arrives in this remote picture-postcard settlement in the Carpathian Mountains, a small multicultural enclave in which every citizen appears to be heavily armed and possessed of an unseemly bloodlust. Eve pops into a restaurant and, in English, orders a coffee. This brief discourse emphasises the generic tone of the film: everybody speaks English and a small Czech restaurant would be unable to serve anything as sophisticated as a flat white. It’s a handsomely appointed eatery and like many of the film’s striking locations, it is about to be shot to a million pieces.
The plot is immaterial. Eve was just a little girl when she witnessed her father killed, and vengeance runs through her blood like platelets. So, when she’s adopted by the Ruska Roma crime syndicate – run by Anjelica Huston’s cigar-puffing Director – she trains harder than anybody else. Her instruction entails a lot of on pointe (for some reason), various martial disciplines and much shooting practice. “Improvise, adapt and cheat. Fight like a girl,” she is drilled by her mentor (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). She will always be smaller and weaker than her opponents, so she must use their own aggression against them (cf. The Karate Kid). But Eve is not interested in serving the Ruska Roma – she just wants to kill Gabriel Byrne, who murdered her father.
The plot merely serves to pack the film with an endless supply of combat porn, which becomes quite wearisome at about the ten-minute mark. The accumulative effect of the violence becomes numbing by the end, in spite of several attempts at novelty. Eve proves quite adept at improvising with a pair of ice skates and there’s an extended sequence utilising the full fury of a duel of flame throwers. But for each stab at innovation, old tropes are hurled into the mix. There’s a seemingly indestructible peroxide blond henchman saved for last and Eve is able to fling herself through closed windows (although a car’s windscreen fails to shatter from a barrage of gun shots). If audiences lap up all this mainstream mayhem, there will be more to come, as the film’s open ending would suggest. Fans of unadulterated, stylish violence may think they’re in Seventh Heaven, but Ballerina is just old tosh dressed to kill.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Reddick, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Norman Reedus, Ian McShane, Keanu Reeves, Ava McCarthy, David Castaneda, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Abraham Popoola, Juliet Doherty, Victoria Comte, Sooyoung Choi, Anne Parillaud.
Dir Len Wiseman, Pro Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee and Chad Stahelski, Ex Pro Keanu Reeves and Kaley Smalley Romo, Screenplay Shay Hatten, Ph Romain Lacourbas, Pro Des Philip Ivey, Ed Jason Ballantine and Nicholas Lundgren, Music Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard, Costumes Tina Kalivas, Dialect coach Dale Wyatt.
Summit Entertainment/Thunder Road Films/87North Productions-Lionsgate.
124 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 6 June 2025. Cert. 15.
