Unofficially subtitled “From the world of John Wick”—in case you couldn’t tell from the copious amount of violence, stunts, and eastern European mythology—Ballerina technically takes place between John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4. (If I’m not mistaken, there’s a ballerina assassin character in Chapter 3, but not this particular one.)
Here, she's named Eve Macarro, played as an adult by Ana de Armas. In fact, Ballerina screenwriter Shay Hatten had his spec script acquired by Lionsgate in 2017, leading to him contributing to the final screenplay of Chapter 3, and making him lead writer on Chapter 4.
With this latest installment/spinoff, Hatten finds ways to tell his complete story about Eve’s history, while also finding opportunities for her to cross paths with Wick (Keanu Reeves, in much more of the film than I was expecting), as well as the staff of the Continental Hotel (including Ian McShane’s Winston and the final screen appearance of Lance Reddick as Charon). The filmmakers also bring back Anjelica Houston and The Director, who is in charge of the Ruska Roma assassin program, a training regimen not unlike Marvel’s Black Widow program or the Sparrow operatives in Red Sparrow. They begin training these women as young girls and teach them how to stalk and kill without mercy or hesitation. But all Eve cares about is finding the people who killed her beloved father in front of her when she was a child, a group led by The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne).
We follow Eve from childhood to her introduction into the assassination traditions, until she becomes one of the ballerinas' most efficient killers. Winston promises she will always be under his protection, and he has plenty of chances to prove that. She finds a worthy mentor in Lena (Catalina Sandino Moreno); Eve also gets a chance to save a little girl (Ava Joyce McCarthy) from being kidnapped into the assassin’s life by befriending her father, Daniel (Norman Reedus), another assassin staying at the Continental when she’s there.
But let’s be honest, we don’t attend John Wick movies for the complicated story; we go for the action. And Ballerina is fully loaded with action. But here’s the thing: the credited director, Len Wiseman (the Underworld movies, Live Free or Die Hard, the Total Recall remake), didn’t direct most of what we’re seeing on screen. The film’s release was delayed a year so that the director of all the other John Wick movies, Chad Stahelski, could reshoot a majority of the movie (with Wiseman not present on set at all) over the course of two to three months. So the fact that Ballerina tonally feels right at home in this universe is not an accident in the slightest.
De Armas has proven herself an action star in works such as No Time To Die and Ghosted (I didn’t say they were all good movies), but in Ballerina, it’s clearly her doing the majority of her own stunts, and it makes a resounding difference. And even though it’s fairly certain that John Wick and company will return in their own film down the line, it’s so great to see Reeves, McShane, and Reddick back in these iconic roles, giving Eve just enough of a boost to make this film a worthy part of this brutal action universe. Like many of the John Wick movies, the mythology threatens to choke the life out of these stories, but as long as you can figure out who wants to kill the hero and who wants to save them, you should be in good hands.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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