We made sure to see Ballerina in theaters and found the first John Wick spinoff didn’t quite hit the mark, though not for lack of trying.
As a longtime fan of the John Wick films, I was beyond intrigued to hear that a spinoff film was being created that centered on someone other than Keanu Reeves’ hyper-deadly assassin. It seemed like a sure fire formula for success: place the audience in the world we already know but tell a story from another point of view.
Ballerina
Directed by: Len Wiseman
Starring: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Reddick, Norman Reedus
Release Date: June 6, 2025
It should have worked. But something wasn’t quite right.
In Ballerina, the story follows Eve (Ana de Armas), an up and coming assassin who joins the ranks after her father is brutally murdered when she is a child. As part of her training, Eve is trained as a ballerina while also learning martial arts, how to shoot, and how to protect an asset from harm. It seems Eve is well on her way to building a life in this league of assassins, until a chance encounter with the group that killed her father upends everything.
Ballerina does not suffer from a lack of visual style. Like the films that came before, there is gorgeous nighttime cinematography that brings this dangerous world to life. Likewise, the combat is also brutal and graphically intense. Ana de Armas brings her own unique spin on combat that is mesmerizing to watch, especially in the latter half of the film. I will also say that Anjelica Huston delivers a fantastic performance as the Director and next to Ana de Armas she was my favorite part of this film.
The problem with Ballerina is that the bulk of the plot feels rushed. It almost feels like two films were squished into one with the hope the audience wouldn’t notice. The build up to the grand climax was particularly awkward as it starts with almost no real build up. At least in the mainline John Wick films the placement of combat and gun fights made sense in the context of the story. In Ballerina it felt more like fighting for fighting’s sake and that is not what this story needed.
And while the story reveals were good, they didn’t feel like they’d been properly earned. Instead of gasping at one of the film’s bigger revelations, my reaction was more akin to “Of course you are.” There needed to be more exposition to properly build the story out and it’s just not there. Consequently what should be major moments feel like blips in the overwhelming flow of combat.
My biggest issue with this film though comes with the film’s villain. Played by Gabriel Byrne, this character had all the potential in the world to be the next great villain in the world of John Wick. There’s charisma, there’s suitable amounts of menace, certainly this character is dangerous enough to fit into this world. But the character suffers, again, from the lack of exposition. It feels like the writers went too far in playing coy with what the audience should and should not know.
I understand that some things in the world of John Wick are meant to be a mystery, but if we the viewers are meant to care whether a villain lives or dies, then at some point there must be exposition to make the stakes clear. All we get in are veiled hints and implications. Which is fine at the start of a film, but these hints are never fully spelled out. There’s only the vague sense of something going on without it ever being explained why the thing is going on. Considering the intricate stories woven through the main John Wick film series, this feels like a really clumsy misstep on the part of Ballerina.
There’s also the film’s almost criminal misuse of Norman Reedus that I cannot overlook. When I saw Norman Reedus was joining the cast of this film, I got excited. I’ve been a fan of his work since The Walking Dead and I was excited to see what he could bring to a story in the world of John Wick. And then his part in the film came up and all I could think was “That’s it?” It is not a good thing when all you can feel is disappointment for a character’s brief screen time and truthfully it felt dangerously close to a waste.
In conclusion, while Ballerina is quite beautiful to look at, and make no mistake the scenes with John Wick are everything we needed them to be, the overall story suffers from a clumsy narrative that is too cluttered to be fully enjoyable. Everyone is clearly doing their best to make this story work, but the lack of exposition in key points could not be overcome in my mind.
