Ballerina

In The Wick Of Time

Ballerina
aka From The World 
Of John Wick - Ballerina
Directed by Len Wiseman (and Chad Stahelski)
USA/Hungary 2025
Lionsgate
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Some spoilers of a sort.

After her big action sequence in the last James Bond movie (No Time To Die, reviewed here) which was, let’s be honest, the only good bit in that entire movie... it was inevitable that someone would have to give Ana de Armas a big action vehicle and, this ‘spin off’ set in ‘the world of John Wick’, called Ballerina, is it. And, I’m glad to report, it’s not the mess that some of its critics and its troubled shooting history would suggest it to be. I had a blast with it, in fact and the story has a very strong through line. Maybe some people just weren’t paying attention.

Okay, so this was never intended to be a John Wick adjacent movie when the script was first written but it was adapted and things were kinda shoehorned in (it does have some slight problems which I’ll get into later but they don’t really detract from the movie as a whole). And even when it was adapted, I don’t think John Wick was originally supposed to have been in it. From what I’m hearing, Len Wiseman’s original cut of the movie was considered a dud in some quarters and so original John Wick director Chad Stahelski had to jump on and do extensive reshoots... and I mean a lot of them from what I am hearing. Which explains a) why this has taken so long to come to screen from when I first heard about it and b) why Lance Reddick is in it as the concierge of The Continental once more... so this was actually his last screen role before his untimely death... along with Ian McShane’s Winston, of course. 

So this is a standard revenge movie with a couple of minor twists but mostly just long and pretty good action sequences. After her father is killed for reasons she’ll discover near the end of the movie, Ana de Armas’ character Eve (taking over from a minor role version of the same character played by someone else in one of the earlier movies) is trained by the branch of the High Table run by Angelica Houston (who gives the whole thing a little more gravitas). She then goes out as an assassin but, soon she gets wind of a path to vengeance and takes it, disrupting the truce between Houston’s people and a group of outsiders, who I’ll get to in a minute.

It’s action all the way including a final act (where she ends up meeting John Wick for a second time, as he’s sent out to stop her) which involves her inadvertently taking on a whole mountain village community who, it turns out, are all trained assassins, lead by the big bad of the movie, played by Gabriel Byrne. And everyone is great in this, especially de Armas. And a big shout out to From star Catalina Sandino Moreno as one of those assassins and also, as one of the concierges, Nikita herself, Anne Parillaud.

There are a couple of problems with, in my opinion, shoehorning in the John Wick stuff, as good as that stuff is. Firstly, his involvement in the final third of the movie didn’t, to me, make sense to where his character is at that point. He should be off the grid and resting up to take on the high table one last time, not working for Angelica Houston. This was all something which could have easily been solved just by setting it either earlier or even before the first couple of movies.

Secondly, the ‘cult’ of assassins, who have not been mentioned once in the series and who don’t play by the rules of the High Table (and yet have a truce with them) makes no sense in this as world building. The whole premise of the world in which these assassins operate revolves around the concept of ‘rules and consequences’... this bunch shouldn’t really be able to exist in this manner, it seems to me... when they are able to launch an attack on the ‘hallowed ground’ of The Continental. That should never happen in this world, surely?

Other than that though, Ana de Armas fighting her way through an entire village of enemies involving death by china plate, death by ice skates and a standout fight between a flame thrower and a water hose... well, it’s all good stuff although, those stunts looked really dangerous (there are a lot of burning people in this movie). But that’s me done with Ballerina... don’t let some of the negative reviews put you off. This one is a real crowd pleaser for the John Wick brigade and I certainly had a good time with it.