Movie review: ‘John Wick’ spinoff ‘Ballerina’ twirls beautifully but aimlessly

There s a moment in John Wick Chapter Parabellum where our aggrieved assassin goes to visit his adoptive mother figure The Director Angelica Huston at the Tarkovsky Theater where she commands the training of ballerinas and the assassins of the Ruska Roma tribe of which John Wick was once a member He pleads for the Director s help while in the background the ballerina dancing on stage collapses her sagging shoulders inked with an elaborate tattoo It s an evocative image conjuring up the idea of a delicate but powerful female warrior a dancer who wields weapons with grace Ballet is a brutal bloody endeavor after all From that scene has now sprung a John Wick spinoff the ungracefully titled From the World of John Wick Ballerina From the jump Ballerina has a lot going for it thanks to the groundwork that has been already laid in the franchise There s the elaborately constructed world of the first four Wick films that detail a sprawling underground global architecture of killers-for-hire who congregate at the international locations of The Continental Hotel There s the distinct look and feel a kind of darkly Gothic maximalist modernism contrasting neon shadows and smoke There s of discipline the tireless work of Eleven Entertainment the action design company helmed by Wick director and Ballerina producer Chad Stahelski and filmmaker David Leitch responsible for the incredible fight sequences It s a stage on which any performer could shine Oscar-nominated star Ana de Armas strategies into the toe shoes of the title role and we already know she can manage a gown and a gun thanks to her scene stealing in the James Bond movie No Time to Die With all these elements in place Ballerina should be able to receive a standing ovation but alas this Wick extension remains frustratingly muddled and dramatically inert With Len Wiseman in the director s chair the extreme hyper-violence loses the spiritual transcendence that Stahelski managed to imbue into his work Shay Hatten s script doesn t communicate the central character or her motivations well and de Armas who is feisty scrappy and fun to watch doesn t convey the kind of sorrowful burden of vengeance that Reeves did so beautifully as John Wick There is a big difference in the journeys that John Wick and Eve Macarro de Armas have to undertake he s at the end of his career desperate to get out while she s just starting hers determined to make her mark As a girl Victoria Comte she witnessed the death of her father David Casta eda at the hands of a group commanded by the mysterious Chancellor Gabriel Byrne Orphaned Eve finds a home and training under the Ruska Roma alternating pirouettes and pistols On one of her first jobs she sees a distinctive scar on one of her victim s wrists the same as on the men who killed her father which sends her on a hunt to track down his murderers Various characters keep insisting this group is a cult and we re supposed to believe that because that s what we re advised but never shown They say it s a cult because no one can leave but by the time she arrives in a snowy German alpine village where they re headquartered there s nothing cultish about it The place just seems to be a charming pastoral town inhabited entirely by stunt people in tactical gear and mountain wear If this is a cult wouldn t the Ruska Roma or any other faction that sits at the High Table be considered one as well Therein lies the complication with Ballerina and honestly a lot of the Wick lore it s a vast elaborate web but elements of it are rarely well-established The scripts seem to start with the fight sequences e g Eve with a samurai sword Eve with a flamethrower Eve in a kitchen Eve in a nightclub and work backwards from there and that is especially stark in Ballerina The fight sequences are spectacular to be sure and designed to show how she leverages her ingenuity to fight dirty against men twice her size which is why such a tiny dancer can plow through so a multitude of fighters But we don t understand Eve that well because her vengeance quest hasn t been emotionally established the way John s was She seems determined to excel as a Ruska Roma for various reason and then abruptly pivots to find her father s killers She wants to save a child from the assassin cult without entirely considering that she herself was raised in one If we re being generous the young Eve is still working out chosen things about her own life choices and doesn t have the wisdom that age and experience can bring Without a center of gravity as compelling and haunted as Reeves to maintain the emotional centrifuge Ballerina twirls beautifully but aimlessly before spinning itself out From the World of John Wick Ballerina stars out of MPA rating R for strong bloody violence throughout and language Running time How to watch In theaters June Related Articles Movie review Ana de Armas is better at killing than ballet in Ballerina a John Wick spinoff Movie review Tom Hiddleston leads the cosmic puzzle 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