The Blood-Red Shoes

My thoughts on From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

Have you long yearned for a continuation of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai based entirely around answering the question of why that watermelon was there? Do you have multiple scenarios in your head as to how that once-rumored spinoff of the James Bond franchise centered on Halle Berry’s deathless character Jinx? Do you have a mortal fear of accidentally watching any current film that isn’t based to some degree on a well-known bit of IP? Then you are just the person who is presumably champing at the bit to see From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, in which an amusing side element that cropped up John Wick 3 has been been given its own feature treatment. Even then, you may find yourself struggling with this utterly pointless extension of the enormously popular action franchise, the kind of movie that only a studio accountant could truly love and probably dreamed up in the first place.

Set at some point between the third and fourth John Wick films, this one centers on Eve, a young girl whose father dies protecting her from an attack by a group of mysterious assassins and who is taken in by our old friend Winston (Ian McShane and delivered to the Ruska Roma organization, where she trains to be both a ballerina and an assassin under the tutelage of The Director (Anjelica Huston, in a performance that goes full Ouspenskya). When we pick up the story, Eve (now played by Ana de Armas) is working as a high-priced killer for the Ruska Romas when she gets a clue as to the mysterious group behind her father’s death and, ignoring the direct order of The Director and the friendly warnings of Winston), she goes off to get revenge, eventually landing in a strange village in the mountains and kicking off a string of action beats in which she slaughters hundreds of people, becomes involved in the rescue of a mysterious little girl of great importance (Ava Joyce McCarthy) and meets the man (Gabriel Byrne, looking vaguely embarrassed) behind her dad’s demise before facing off with the killer sent in by The Director to finish her off for good—none other than John Wick himself (Keanu Reeves, whose presence is not nearly as large as the ads might suggest).

I have admired all of the John Wick films (indeed, it has proven to be the rare recent franchise to improve with each outing) for a number of reasons—the sleek and striking visual style established by director Chad Stahelski over the course of the series, the droll dark humor, the action beats that are incredibly ambitious in their conception and jaw-dropping in their execution, the amusing ways in which they have teased out an entire world in which seemingly everyone is a hitman with a obligation to a strict code of ethics and, of course, Keanu Reeves, whose perpetual state of holy cool proved to be the perfect fit for his character. Sadly, most of these elements have been left on the sidelines this time around and the film suffers greatly as a result. The screenplay was reportedly first written as an original vehicle before being reworked to fit into The World of John Wick and it definitely feels like it—you get the feeling that the biggest concern was making sure that it did not contradict the previously established mythology than in telling a story that could stand on its own. Taking over the directorial reins is Len Wiseman (his first feature since that Total Recall remake that you forgot even existed until I mentioned it just now) but while he doesn’t skimp on the body count, pretty much all of the fight sequences have a been-there-done-that feel to them that can’t help but feel like a comedown from the exhilarating heights established by its predecessors. (This may not entirely be Wiseman’s fault—reports have suggested that after being dissatisfied with Wiseman’s cut, which was originally supposed to be released around this time last year, large portions were eventually reshot by Stahelski.)

I have also been an admirer of Ana de Armas as well—even in bad movies, her presence is usually intriguing enough to hold ones interest—and if the last James Bond movie, No Time to Die, did nothing else (and it really didn’t), it allowed her to demonstrate that she had what it took to be a convincing action hero during her brief appearance. While her ability to be reasonably convincing at kicking ass is on display throughout here, she cannot do anything with the cipher of a character that she has been stuck with to make her come across as interesting as she goes about her rampage of revenge. As for the other actors, newcomers to the fold like Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Norman Reedus fail to make much of an impression (though I give the film credit from bringing in Anne Parillaud—the iconic Nikita herself—for a brief appearance) while returning lights like Huston, McShane and Lance Riddick (in the last role before his 2023 passing) are having fun but their appearances have all the weight and gravity of the Simpsons visiting Chief Wiggum at his new job in New Orleans. As for Reeves, he does manage to juice things up a tad during his brief, if ultimately extraneous, appearances but for the most part, his work here does little more than straddle the line between “good sport” and “contractural obligation.”

Ultimately, Ballerina is little more than a very expensive piece of fan fiction that never comes close to living up to the legacy of its inspiration. While I cannot say for certain that I would have liked any better if it had stayed its own thing and not been reworked to fit into a franchise that it was not originally meant to be a part of (especially in the hands of Wiseman, a director who took the idea of a leather-clad Kate Beckinsale battle werewolves and vampires and somehow managed to make it the dullest thing imaginable), I suspect that whatever those results might have, they probably would not have been as alternately disappointing and annoying as what we have here. This is the kind of soulless exercise in brand extension that exists only to win a couple of weekends at the box-office and pull in big streaming numbers before fading from memory as soon as the extensive promotional campaign comes to an end. That would be bad enough under normal circumstances but for something this banal to follow in the path of a series of films that went out of their way to give viewers their moneys worth and then some is almost profoundly dispiriting to watch.