“Tend to your wounds or you will get sepsis and we will have to cut off your feet.”
The Ballerina is a sumptuous, globe-galloping, action-packed assassin adventure that takes place in the world of the John Wick movies. Ana de Armas is lithe and gorgeous; she gracefully and believably performs her fight choreography in addition to her gun-fu. However, somewhat handicapped by a routine and mundane origin-through-vengeance plot that seems to be there solely to spawn sequels, The Ballerina is a feast for the eyes that leaves the brain starving.
Directed by Len Wiseman and written by Shay Hatten, The Ballerina is a 2025 feature from Lionsgate Films starring Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McShane and Norman Reedus with an appearance by Lance Reddick.
“He is beating you because you are allowing him to define the terms of the engagement. Fight like a girl.”
When Eve Macarro (de Armas) is very young, a team of hitmen is sent to kill her father, an assassin in the employ of Winston Scott (McShane). Her Dad dispatches them but is mortally wounded. Winston leaves the despairing orphan in the care of the Director (Huston), who runs the Ruska Roma, a dancing school that doubles as an academy for assassins, bodyguards, and operators of every stripe. There, while also learning ballet, Eve trains to be a Kikomora, an armed chaperone named after a mythical spirit of vengeance that is also a savage protector of the innocent.
Several years pass as she masters many skills. Her final test is a cold-blooded competition involving assembling a gun and shooting a complete stranger in the face. She is then put to work and proves very effective at her protective assignments, dropping anyone who dares to confront her or her charge. One afternoon, after concluding a job with devastation in her wake, she is attacked by a goon who is very late to the party. She dispatches him deftly, then recognizes a brand he has on his wrist which matches the markings on the wrists of the men who murdered her father.
Bracing the Director, she is ordered point blank not to pursue an investigation, instructions she promptly ignores. She visits the Continental and asks Winston for assistance. He tells Eve she is hunting a cult of killers led by the Chancellor (Byrne) that operates in parallel with, and similar to, the assassins he manages out of his hotel but are not bound by any of the rules that constrain them. Her father was a member of the cult but fled in an attempt to give Eve a normal life. Winston determines that Daniel Pine (Reedus), a person staying at the Continental in Prague, is also on the run from the cult, whereupon Eve hops the next flight to the Czech Republic.
She confronts Pine in his hotel room as a hit team approaches in violation of the Continental rules. Eve is shocked to discover that Pine is with his daughter, Ella, escaping in hopes of breaking the cycle and letting her be a regular kid. The hit team strikes; Pine is shot, Eve is K.O.’d, and the kid is napped.
Can Eve convince the Continental staffers that she didn’t break any of their strictures? Can she figure out where the team took Ella? Will this sidequest get in the way of her vendetta? If she finds them, will killing her father’s killers slake her bloodlust? Please watch The Ballerina to find out.
“Everyone who has gone looking has gone missing. That’s bad math.”
The Ballerina is a beautiful film. The locations and sets are stunning. The shot composition is magnificent, and nearly every scene is lit with opposite sides of the color wheel, making the visuals pop. Eve’s adventures range from Wick’s New York through Prague and ultimately to a picturesque, small town in Austria called Hallstatt. The ultra-modern trappings of the Continental Hotels, or the swanky, neon-soaked nightclubs she frequents, contrast nicely with the rustic village in the snow-cloaked slopes.
Pistols, rifles, shotguns, machine guns of various stripes, grenades, Claymores, flamethrowers, knives, ice picks, many, many hammers, hatchets, porcelain plates, swords and skates are all used to gruesome effect during The Ballerina’s multiple action scenes.
Paper beats rock; At one point, Eve fights fire with water and wins. Grenades get a good workout in The Ballerina, and unlike the way grenades are typically treated by Hollywood, here they are not messing around in the slightest. People and parts of buildings get blown up, but good. The detonations have weight. The CG blood spurts almost look like old-school squibs. It’s not quite there yet. The color is somewhat off, and the wounds don’t spray right.
Fight scenes are efficiently shot with a modicum of shake in the camera. Some individual clashes go on a bit too long and others are a little cartoonish. A scene with a gun hidden beneath a pile of dishes wouldn’t have been out of place in a Merrie Melodies Bugs Bunny movie.
From the warm amber light in the Ruska Roma dormitories, the moody reds and the pale blues of the Minus 11 nightclub, the emerald desk-lamps with brass fixtures dotting the Continental’s library, the harsh whites of the icy Hallstatt hills or the orange gouts of fire spraying across a night blue sky, the use of color in The Ballerina is superb.
While the Ruska Roma bears some similarities with the Red Room from the MCU, where Black Widows are trained, both the presence of men at the school and the protective nature of the Kikomora role create enough distance as to not be a problem for this reviewer.
The Ballerina takes place between John Wick: Chapter 3- Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4. Keanu Reeves’ reputation as the Baba Yaga weighs upon every character he crosses paths with but where most are terrified, Eve is undaunted and eager to learn from him. Wick looks at her avid face with heavy eyes burdened by his experiences in the assassin underworld. He knows what it’s like to be a pawn and reminds Eve that, unlike him, her door isn’t locked.
Lance Reddick’s scenes as Charon in The Ballerina are the last the actor would perform before his untimely death in 2023.
As the Big Bad, (a nearly unrecognizable) Gabriel Byrne’s creepy Chancellor isn’t a particularly intimidating foe, but his real power is in the waves of omnipresent, faceless goons he is able to send after Eve in scene after scene.
A viewer not familiar with the John Wick series might find themselves a little lost as nothing about the Continentals, coins, or rules are given any exposition. The Ballerina could have been a perfectly serviceable stand-alone tale, but it’s clear the hope is that using the Wick name and Keanu Reeves’ cachet will draw a larger audience. As an origin story, the picture is practically a paint-by-numbers tale of revenge, but the plot isn’t the draw in this lush and resplendent film; the fights are. With a the contents of two literal armories at her disposal, Ana de Armas nails the brawls (while nailing a lot of guys in the balls) and makes it look believable when she topples 250 lb men twice her size.
The Ballerina is in theatres 6/6/2025.
Anthony Andujar Jr.