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.  

John Wick Chapter 4

At My Wick’s End?

John Wick Chapter 4
USA 2023 Directed by Chad Stahelski
Lionsgate
UK cinema release print

Warning: An obvious implied spoiler at the end...

Okay so, the John Wick films have been a long ride. I never expected them to go through as many sequels but I’m kinda glad they did. John Wick Chapter 4 is an even longer ride than most of them, being about an hour more than the original film which kickstarted the franchise and... like the others to a certain extent, it’s all about attaining a purer form of action cinema. A stripped down, choreographed ballet of blood and fists which delivers body blow after body blow, piling them onto each and every main actor in amounts that, thanks partly to the Kevlar suits the characters wear and partly due to the poetic nature of the fantasy element on display here, no normal person could really survive all that well without rolling around on the floor for half an hour after one or two impacts.

And fans of the films will certainly, for the most part (I know one exception), love this movie as much as the others. It really takes that honed down action motif and divests it of all but the most necessary dialogue scenes with, of course, John Wick himself, played brilliantly by Keanu Reeves, being a man of few words. He allows others to do the talking for him for the most part but, even so, there’s not an awful lot of plot on display in this one.

What that means, of course, is that in the few dialogue scenes... and some of them are very well written, with the exception perhaps of the rather delusional musings of Lawrence Fishburne’s character (who does well with what he has to work with)... everyone else gets better lines than the lead star. And, along with Reeves and Fishburne, there are some excellent actors in this one... some I knew and some I didn’t. 

So, of course, returning is Ian McShane as Winston, the manager of the New York branch of The Continental, the shining outpost which goes a long way to defining the shadow world in which the assassins in these movies are able to work. Then there’s Lance Reddick as his concierge Charon, who sadly died, much too young, one week before this film’s premiere (there is a dedication to him at the film’s close... I guess it’s easier to quickly do this in the sad world of modern digital prints now).

There are also numerous new characters who are all brilliant but I’m just going to pick on three of them here. So we have the lead villain, this time played by Bill Skarsgård. I really hated him in this but, that’s because he plays the character so well, throwing in an arrogance and hiding his lack of intelligence behind a facade which I really can’t imagine anyone respecting. So good for him for making this person truly unlikeable.

Then there’s Caine, played by famous ‘martial arts’ actor Donnie Yen from the Ip Man films (which I’ve still not seen but, I have the first three piled up somewhere to watch and, I guess I’ll pick up the fourth at some point if I like those). It’s quite strange because, in Rogue One - A Star Wars Story, Yen played a blind character who was absolutely modelled on the famous blind gambler Zatoichi, who appeared in so many films played by Shintaro Katsu (and a few others). In this film, he’s once again playing a blind, unstoppable killing machine who uses sound to more accurately sense where his enemies attacks are coming from. I really think some enterprising studio needs to go the hole hog now and just make some new Zatoichi films with Donnie Yen recreating the iconic character.

Finally there’s Shamier Anderson as Tracker. Now this is an interesting one because he is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of less honed John Wick surrogate character. He works with a dog as his loyal companion which, of course, is something John would be sympathetic to too... Wick’s dog fixation is barely mentioned in this fourth part but there is a definite nod to it both in Tracker’s dependence and description of his working pet as an ‘emotional support dog’ and, also, in a nice moment where John Wick makes a tough decision and inadvertently wins Tracker’s heart over to his own cause. So, yeah, it’s actually an important character and, Wick and Caine notwithstanding, he’s probably the coolest person in the movie.

And, yeah, it’s full of action and heart... much like the others you are rooting for a fair few of the characters and, yes, it has emotional tension, not least from the relationship between former allies and friend Wick and Caine, who are pitched against each other here. It also looks great and has exactly the same kind of dark neon colour palette of its predecessors. And then there’s the end... and this is where the spoilers come in. The dramatic arc of the central character is possibly quite obvious to a lot of people and, yes, all I will say is that this film actually goes there. What’s the real sucker punch, though, for people like myself who were expecting an ending like this (there’s a post credits sequel too folks... stay past the end) is that, by the climax of the film, there’s absolutely an option for it not to end with what once seemed like the inevitable conclusion of the John Wick character arc so, yeah, I think it will hit some harder than others.

But, like both the director and lead actor have acknowledged here, the audience will certainly bring their own baggage with them when translating the endgame of the movie and, things which happen in the shadowy world of The Continental and The Table (a world where there never seems to be a shred of law enforcement to interfere in any killing portrayed on film... thus pushing it further into a fantasy land), are not as they might seem in the real world. In other words, no matter what the fate of the central character, there was always going to be a physical aid to help him remain undercover in his new life or death, as a necessity perhaps. All I’m saying is that, although the film might seem conclusive to some (as it does me), there’s certainly an option to do a John Wick Chapter Five at some point down the line (I've already heard rumblings of it this morning)... although whether Keanu Reeves, who’s not getting any younger, would be able to still do one is another matter.

Ultimately, I thought John Wick Chapter Four was a fine movie in the ‘distilled, minimalist action’ genre. I didn’t think it was the best in the series... I still prefer the second movie over all of them... but it does what fans of the franchise would expect it to do and is an entertaining, if over long, slice of thrills and spills. Miss it at your peril.