While the miniseries The Continental showed us the backstory of Winston Scott, Ballerina is the more novel spin-off of the John Wick franchise, focusing on an entirely new character in this mysterious world. Ana De Armas brings us Eve Macarro, an orphan of the Ruska Roma from John Wick Chapter 3. Her movie is a paternal revenge quest that’s rife with action, but it fails to present a uniquely JW plotline.
As a John Wick film, Ballerina delivers in action and creative murder methods; the flamethrowers near the movie’s end were certainly the best part. But Ballerina doesn’t live up to its R-rating – aside from one or two gory explosions, the violence is largely bloodless and run-of-the-mill for an action flick. We only get a handful of interesting set pieces in the fight scenes. What I wanted and expected from this movie, however, was a use of its title. Isn’t Eve the titular ballerina? Why isn’t that side of her character incorporated into her skillset?
All the movie gives us from the Ruska Roma is an orphanage/assassin school where ballet is one of its many exercises. I wanted to see Eve use her ballet moves in a fight! Dance through the battles, pirouette away from an attacker, make a jete out a window! As it stands, the title feels misleading, and Eve’s methods of choice when it comes to murder are largely commonplace.
It’s worth noting that Eve often gets bodied in her fight scenes. When her opponent is larger than her, they’ll often knock her to the ground or send her flying into a wall. It’s a nice realistic touch, offset by how quickly Eve tends to get back up. This aspect would’ve been more impactful (pun intended) if Eve required more of a recovery time between battles. I guess that’s the John Wick in her, isn’t it?
What made the first John Wick movie so iconic was the heart of its revenge mission. Our hero wasn’t out to avenge his father, wife, or child, but his murdered puppy. And it’s not merely the puppy itself, but what that dog represented: the last gift from his dead wife, his tether to the “normal” world in an attempt to free himself from his past. When the puppy is killed, the audience is on Wick’s side, cheering him on.
But Ballerina fails to deliver this same emotional premise or a revenge story that comes close to the magnificence of Wick’s. Eve’s backstory is the painfully simple cliche of a murdered father, and the movie gives us little more than Eve attempting to avenge his death. At the film’s start, we don’t know enough about her family to become attached to her father, nor care about her enough as a protagonist to be fully invested in her journey.
The plot shows the possibility of taking a turn when, hunting down her father’s killers, Eve comes across Pine (aka, according to my mom, “that guy from the zombie movie”) and his young daughter, whom Pine is trying to save from the cult that murdered Eve’s father. But Pine gets a disappointingly short amount of screen time before dropping out of the picture as his daughter, Ella, is snatched up by the cult.
This new development could’ve served as more than the next step in Eve’s revenge plot. Instead, she could’ve recognized Ella as herself as a child and vowed to rescue the girl the way her father rescued her. But while a viewer can naturally assume that Ella is on Eve’s mind, nothing in her dialogue or actions ever suggests this. Eve remains laser-focused on killing the Chancellor, to the point of not even mentioning Ella when she’s trying to convince Wick to let her finish her mission. In the end, she does save the girl and reunite her with her father, but there’s no emotional heart in it from Eve’s end.
Halfway through the film, a startling reveal is made to Eve: her presumed-dead sister, Lena, is alive. She says that their father took Eve away from their cult to safety but couldn’t take Lena because Lena had already murdered someone which… doesn’t really make sense. I mean, you couldn’t try saving your other daughter? No. Okay. And mere moments after this futile reaching out to Eve, Lena is killed! Her name never even comes up again, so what point did her existence hold?
The world of John Wick is a fascinating, disbelief-suspending one. With every movie, the universe is expanded bit by bit, revealing new faces and facets. But The Continental cleverly takes a step back, with the miniseries narrowing in on the hotel itself, the High Table, and the Bowery. I expected a similar path for Ballerina, thinking it would dive into the layers of the Ruska Roma.
But this is not what the movie delivered. Instead of expanding on this mysterious ballet house, Ballerina spent the majority of its screentime outside its walls. We gain some new information on the house’s training methods and what it does with those who cannot kill, but the plot points often fall into cliches. The hand-to-hand combat training, the murder test… as I mentioned at the beginning of my review, I hoped ballet was the major focal point of the Ruska Roma’s teachings. Instead, it’s just one of their many exercises.
Ballerina also extends its bounds, with Eve’s adventure taking place in a tiny cult village filled with killers. Despite its interesting beginnings, this environment largely exists for the sake of Eve having a number of NPCs to take down. While the village offers a handful of clever set pieces (the flamethrowers cannot go unmentioned), it falls into cliche more often than not. The move of “shooting the bad guy in the middle of his speech” is too overused to be cinematically poignant.
Irritatingly, the most iconic and funniest parts of Ballerina aren’t about the titular ballerina herself at all. John Wick trying to convince Eve to leave the village is a fun if slightly confusing cameo (if this is post Chapter 3, why is he still doing favors for the Ruska Roma?). And the NPCs saying, “We have to get out of here, it’s John Wick!” “Relax, it’s just one guy!” right before Wick shoots them is brilliant, as is the big bad refusing to leave his home until he realizes Wick is out, and then he’s hurrying to the car!
Ballerina ends much the same as Chapter 2, with Eve going out into the world with a rising bounty on her head. But her character doesn’t have Wick’s attachment, novelty, or depth. The path of the ongoing John Wick franchise is Wick’s journey to find something in his life that isn’t more death. Eve, on the other hand, doesn’t carry enough emotional potential for future stories or the plot to make them happen.
