From the World of John Wick: Ballerina
Directed by Len Wiseman
Written by Shay Hatten
Starring Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston and Ian McShane
Classification 14A; 122 minutes
Opens in theatres June 6
In a way, Lionsgate has turned its John Wick franchise into the titular hero’s poor little puppy.
In the first John Wick movie, Keanu Reeves’s supremely skilled hit man was sent on a rampage through New York City’s underworld after the idiotic son of a mobster decided to kill the hero’s dog over some perceived slight.
Three sequels and one television miniseries later, and every single criminal across the Wick Cinematic Universe has paid the price for that one pet’s head. But even after the finale of 2023’s John Wick: Chapter 4 seemed to finally let Reeves’s “Baba Yaga” gunman rest in peace, the studio behind the franchise seems intent on mercilessly and foolishly beating the life out of the series until it has been bled dry.
Earlier this spring, Lionsgate not only announced that a fifth John Wick was in development, but that there would also be a feature-length anime movie set in the same universe, a spinoff starring Donnie Yen’s character from the fourth film, and the imminent release of Ballerina, another long-in-development spinoff starring Ana de Armas as a (what else?) highly skilled assassin.
Ana de Armas in a scene from From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.Larry D. Horricks/Lionsgate/Lionsgate
The attempt to Marvel-ize the Wick movies is at once understandable (studios today live and die by their franchises) and exceptionally depressing.
At their best, the Wick films deliver beautifully brutal action, with Reeves and his long-time director Chad Stahelski inventing and then refining a new kind of cinematic violence – cold and cool, efficient and energizing. But when Wick goes wrong, such as large portions of Chapter 3 and 4, plus the forgettable miniseries The Continental – the results can be exhausting.
Such is the case with Ballerina – or as it is officially titled, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina – whose handful of standout moments cannot justify such an egregious case of franchise bloat.
Exploiting a mere sliver of story from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, in which Anjelica Huston popped up for a minute as the head of a Russian ballet school whose students were also trained killers, Ballerina concocts an especially dull origin story for an ancillary piece of Wickian lore.
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At the heart of the film is Eve (de Armas), who was orphaned as a child and placed into the dubious care of Huston’s academy. After growing up learning the finer points of both arabesque and assassination, Eve goes on the hunt for the family of Austrian mobsters (led by Gabriel Byrne’s patriarch) who killed her father so many years ago.
Along the way, the film shoehorns in a few brief encounters between Eve and a pre-Chapter 4 (i.e. not-dead-yet) John Wick himself, plus such supporting characters as the dapper underworld powerbroker/hotelier Winston (Ian McShane) and his sidekick/concierge Charon (Lance Reddick, who died more than a year ago, revealing just how long this film has been in postproduction).
These bits are the film’s most unnecessary moments, their inclusion only evidence of just how concerned producers were about ensuring audiences knew that this was, in fact, a Wick-set tale and not something that had mistakenly escaped a direct-to-digital release and made it to the big screen.
Lance Reddick, left, Ian McShane, centre, and de Armas.Larry D. Horricks/Lionsgate/Lionsgate
Perhaps the filmmakers wouldn’t have been so worried, though, had the majority of Ballerina’s action felt more closely aligned to the Wick films in their style and scale.
Instead, director Len Wiseman (whose dull Underworld films and dreadful Live Free or Die Hard should have pre-disqualified him from the gig) and regular Wick screenwriter Shay Hatten mostly put Eve through the generic shoot-out paces, with so much of the fight choreography punching below its weight.
For every moment that does work – such as when Eve and an anonymous foe go Greek, smashing each other atop the head with enough dinner plates to inspire a thousand “Opas!” or when Eve tosses grenade after grenade to a horde of henchmen – there are a half-dozen more that fail to raise the pulse.
De Armas is clearly committed to keeping the stakes high, even if the script fails to offer the full charm offensive she displayed in No Time to Die. But everyone else seems to be either wasted (Byrne, McShane, Reeves, a blink-and-miss-him Norman Reedus) or impatiently waiting for their cheque to clear (mostly Huston, who seems to be pulling a Mission: Impossible-era Ving Rhames move by refusing to ever stand up).
At the very least, though, Lionsgate can confidently say that no animals were hurt during the making of this film. The Wick franchise, on the other hand? Well, that might’ve just gone to the dogs.