‘From the World of John Wick: Ballerina’ Review: Ana de Armas Kicks an Adequate Amount of Ass in Recycled ‘Wick’ Leftovers [B-]

If the title From the World of John Wick: Ballerina didn’t clue you into what cinematic universe the film in question is set in (for real, that’s the full title of the movie), it wouldn’t take you long to figure it out. A bracingly new perspective on the franchise, this is not—Ballerina is happy to act as a familiar, adjacent counterpart to the Keanu Reeves-led action opuses about a retired contract killer whose revenge path after the death of his wife and dog spirals into one escalating tableau of violence after another. 

It’s not just the familiar faces that show up—such as Anjelica Huston as The Director, the Continental Hotel mainstays Ian MacShane and the late Lance Reddick, or Reeves himself returning as our favorite, tortured killing machine. It’s the tone and visual and thematic motifs that are carried over that help to define this world populated by a preposterous number of clandestine assassins, ready to drop everything on a whim to chase a new contract when it pops up on their phone. Another story about a steely killer out for revenge; the heightened anime-like melodrama that is nestled into the contours of the dialogue; the “use whatever commonplace object you can grab” style of combat; and of course overarching stylistic tendencies, even simply down to the dramatic italicized subtitles that fade in and out.

If you didn’t know any better you’d think director Len Wiseman, who launched the extremely-of-its-time Underworld franchise before making underwhelming editions of existing series with Live Free and Die Hard and his Total Recall remake, had found a way to successfully ape the personality of the linchpin of the entire Wick enterprise, Chad Stahelski, to an encouragingly competent degree for someone whose existing filmography is distinctly lacking in any particularly graceful stylistic verve. Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise when a story dropped last year that Stahelski had to reshoot significant portions of Ballerina without Wiseman’s involvement.

Both Stahelski and Wiseman have gone on to downplay the scale of reshoots that seemingly delayed the film’s release date by a year, but by all accounts, the former had more than just an advisory position in his producer role. While that means Ballerina fundamentally feels like it operates in the Wick universe, it also carries a faint mismatch of styles, oscillating between the slick, dextrous fighting sequences that the franchise has become synonymous with and elements that feel amusingly retro and reverent of over-the-top blockbusters of the 90s and aughts, like a climax involving opponents battling each other with flame throwers. 

Even as it stumbles through some of the fallout of its lopsided production, Ballerina more often than not finds ways to anchor its footing, making it a more worthwhile Wick-world extension than the drab television spinoff The Continental. It plays as a back-to-basics take on a cinematic universe that has become roguishly convoluted throughout the Reeves-led films, while incorporating some of the methodically choreographed melee sequences that gradually became more intricate as the franchise wore on. But the story itself mirrors John’s tribulations in his first outing: Ruska Roma assassin Eve (Ana de Armas) goes rogue from her organization in order to get revenge on the competing assassin tribe that killed her family, led by a figure known as The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne).

John Wick: Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 scribe Shay Hatten keeps things simple while incorporating stray in-universe elements that we’ve grown accustomed to, accounting for the fact that this takes place simultaneously with Chapter 3. Though, there are elements of his script that seem like casualties from mid- or post-production meddling. Norman Reedus shows up for two scenes to not do much more than add an additional wrinkle to a story that didn’t need it, incorporating a child for Eve to save from The Chancellor, her achievement of which would be all but purely incidental to her real goal of obtaining her own vengeance. Ballerina is best at its most streamlined, especially once Eve arrives at a remote, snowy European village inhabited entirely by killers out to get her, a great videogame-like elevator pitch for a Wick movie that it feels like the film could have capitalized on sooner in the runtime, and with a little more fervor.

Still, there are some good eats here for Wick fans that have come to expect fantastically heightened fight sequences that depict ridiculous methods of dispatching one’s opponents with crystal-clear legibility, making the link between the physicality of brawling and dancing literal through de Armas’ participation in both (though any focus on her as an actual ballerina is fairly minute—she’s largely a simple Reeves analogue). The stunt coordination team puts forward a focus on the slapstick nature of watching bodies pummel each other with whatever environmental objects they can find; a brief glimpse on a television of the Buster Keaton gag in which a two-story house collapses around him from the film Steamboat Bill Jr. offers an inkling of the general frame of reference for Ballerina’s headspace. You have your typical (ahem) balletic gun-fu style shootouts and clean camera tracking of brutal hand-to-hand clashing, but you also get sequences like Eve and a goon successively smashing glass plates over each other’s heads, or ice skates used as nunchakus to swing around and impale the nearest fleshy body with. They even give de Armas a sword!

Speaking of de Armas, she holds her own when it comes to the physicality of leading such a corporeally intensive venture, though her performance as Eve comes off a bit flat. The Wick universe is prone to characters espousing learned wisdom about fate and choices and revenge with a certain matter-of-fact pragmatism, but the wooden quality of de Armas’ performance doesn’t come with the same vague mysticism that Reeves affords his cipher of a man, who absorbs all the heavy blows of his life and bottles them up until its time to tactfully unleash his temper. Even in his brief and welcome addition here, you can feel the contrast in how Reeves’ esoteric acting style melds into this universe in a way that makes it difficult for others to follow in his footsteps. 

That said, it would be unfair to go into Ballerina expecting John Wick 5, especially when it’s being delivered to us hot off the heels of arguably the best entry in the franchise with Chapter 4. Instead, Ballerina is content in owning its role on the sidelines, taking an opportunity to explore just a little bit more of an interesting world, and delivering just enough satisfying sequences of bone-crunching tumult to satiate the current Wick-sized hole in action fans’ hearts. If we want to keep returning to The World of John Wick to see new people creatively beating the shit out of each other, well, there’s worse ways to spend Lionsgate’s money.

Lionsgate will release From the World of John Wick: Ballerina in theaters on June 6.