BALLERINA (2025) is “from the world of JOHN WICK.” That’s the tagline, not the title – like “Die Harder.” I have seen some spinoff skepticism swirling around this one, but don’t come to me for that shit. When the makers of JOHN WICK invite me into the world of JOHN WICK I don’t even have to grab my go-bag. I just run full speed toward them.

I have also seen grumbling about it being directed by Len Wiseman (UNDERWORLD) and about having had reshoots (seemingly quite extensive) overseen and/or directed by Chad Stahelski. But I think the former has pretty good action chops and the latter has honest-to-God action vision, so it is not surprising to me that BALLERINA has arrived as a total banger. Is it as good as the JOHN WICKs? No. Is it better than most movies that are not JOHN WICKs? Yes.

Here is my viewing journey with BALLERINA: first 15 or 20 minutes – It’s okay that this is kinda clunky compared to a JOHN WICK because it kinda rules anyway. Everything after that – on second thought this almost is as good as a JOHN WICK and in fact it absolutely rules.

Eve Macarro (Victoria Comte, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon) is a little girl who witnesses the death of her father (David Castañeda, SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO) after he battles numerous home invaders with Wickian competence. Also she kills a guy and sees an X-shaped scar on a wrist that will become important when she’s an adult (Ana de Armas, THE GRAY MAN). But first Continental Hotel manager Winston (Ian McShane, DEATH RACE) brings the orphan girl to the Ruska Roma, the established-in-JOHN-WICK-3 assassin guild/ballet school run by The Director (Anjelica Huston, CAPTAIN EO). There she’s mentored by Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster, ROGUE ONE) to become a “Kikimora,” trained to protect rather than kill (at least sometimes – I was a little confused by the inconsistency).

Many years later when she’s a highly skilled fighter/protector/killer she encounters the scar again and learns that it’s not a “tribe” as she assumed but a cult, and she disobeys The Director to go after them for revenge. This brings her to the Prague branch of the series’ underworld hotel the Continental, where cult member Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus, BLADE II) has been holed up. Of course the situation is more complicated than she knew and that Kikimora stuff comes in handy when she’s guilted into protecting Pine’s daughter (Ava Joyce McCarthy, “Kid,” 2 episodes of Andor). Ultimately she ends up in a picturesque alpine village run by the girl’s grandfather/her father’s murderer The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne, COOL WORLD), where there’s a really funny escalation toward the reveal that (spoiler) every single adult in the town is a trained killer who’s gonna come after her. (And even the kids have gun targets on their playgrounds.)

I think it does a good job of being “from the world of JOHN WICK,” using established ideas like trading gold coins for favors, the rules against killing on Continental grounds, and the existence of enormous dance clubs where extreme violence will not stop people from dancing, but more than that by coming up with new ideas that fit into that heightened reality, like this snowy town of assassins, its surveillance system of a guy called The Eye (Waris Ahluwalia, OKJA) watching the streets from a tower full of old-timey telescopes, and rules and bargains that pop up like no one in the town can attack until a bell rings, she has until midnight to accomplish her task, etc.

Even better, two of the standout sequences are clever subversions of the expected JOHN WICK tropes. The “this isn’t good, this is great” turning point for me is when there’s a time jump and we find Eve in the middle of an assignment having already killed her target in the restroom of a night club. As she works her way out of the building we get to reverse engineer in our imagination the spectacular fight she had based on the trail of corpses and wreckage in her wake. That gimmick has already made it a classic sequence when they add the great joke that she keeps removing knives from the dead people to use again later.

The traditional purchasing of high class weapons scene (this time in a hunting lodge themed shop) is abruptly interrupted by gunfire, so she has to run away before getting her arsenal. But she does run into the back room and find many delightful ways to use the shitload of grenades she finds stored there.

There’s just so much here to enjoy. I like learning that there’s a level of respect above The Nod which is The Tattoo Nod. You are in front of your whole ballet assassin class getting a huge back tattoo in recognition of the completion of your training and then you look over your shoulder and both of your mentors give you The Nod. I like seeing Norman Reedus do a bit of Wickian combat. I like that Daniel Bernhardt shows up as a scar-faced thug who is probly not the same character who John Wick seemingly leg-choked to death in the dance club in part 1. I like the training montage that intercuts grueling ballet falls with various combat exercises. Maybe the dancing is why later she can balance so well on ice. Of course it was bittersweet to see Charon again, knowing Lance Reddick died a few months after filming his scenes. I had not seen LA FEMME NIKITA recently enough to recognize its star Anne Parillaud as Charon’s counterpart in Prague. And until the credits I didn’t realize that the cool actress playing The Chancellor’s right hand woman was Catalina Sandino Moreno, 2004 best actress nominee for MARIA FULL OF GRACE.

(Come to think of it, de Armas was nominated best actress for BLONDE and Huston for THE GRIFTERS. That should be a prerequisite for casting in these. We’re running a high class operation here.)

There’s a theme about agency or lack thereof: the Chancellor repeatedly talks about things being fated and inevitable while Winston, The Director, Nogi and John Wick all make references to Eve choosing her way in life. I came out thinking that there’s no such thing as fate but also she wasn’t given that much of a choice, and is frequently told what to do or not do. On the other hand her Ruska Roma friend Tatiana (Juliet Doherty, HIGH STRUNG FREE DANCE) does seem to have been allowed to leave peacefully and become a very successful actual ballerina.

But BALLERINA is obviously more invested in its thrills than its philosophizing. It’s one of those joyfully entertaining movies where I just can’t stop smiling. Once things get rolling there are no brakes – it genuinely becomes non-stop action in the best sense, with variety, rhythm and a confidence in being able to show us fun things we’ve never seen quite like this before. An obvious standout is when she finds a blowtorch (and fire proof cloak!) and it becomes an acrobatic fire duel. I have no idea how much actual pyrotechnics we’re looking at but it certainly looks like they did most of this shit for real and upped the ante on fire stunts the way JOHN WICK 3 did with dog stunts. 

(Fire specialist stunt coordinator: Jayson Dumenigo, DEAD MAN DOWN, GOD IS A BULLET.)

I don’t want to play the POLTERGEIST game and take credit away from Wiseman, though the best parts of the movie do seem more like Stahelski’s previous work to me than Wiseman’s. Then again, it was always gonna be 87Eleven action, that’s the whole point. For whatever it’s worth, the two have had a long relationship (Stahelski did stunts on Wiseman’s LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD) and say they collaborated on the reshoots in the name of making the movie better.

Whatever the truth is about either director’s contributions, the credited second unit director is Darrin Prescott (DRIVE, BABY DRIVER, WICKs 1-3) and the fight coordinators are Jeremy Marinas (CLOSE RANGE, GEMINI MAN, SILENT NIGHT) and Caleb Spillyards (THUNDERBOLTS*). Since they are also important to effective action I will note editors Jason Ballantine (WOLF CREEK, THE GREAT GATSBY, additional editor on FURY ROAD), Julian Clarke (DISTRICT 9, TERMINATOR: DARK FATE) and Nicholas Lundgren (assistant editor on WEST SIDE STORY) as well as cinematographer Romain Lacourbas (COLOMBIANA). One thing we can trust about Stahelski is that he’s not a producer who’s gonna get bored with the action and tell them to add a bunch of needless cuts.

I’m sure most of you know this has been in the works for nearly a decade. Then-23-year old Shay Hatten wrote the script as its own JOHN-WICK-inspired assassin tale, but not only did he end up selling it to the makers of JOHN WICK to turn into an actual JOHN WICK movie, they even had him rewrite then-in-development part 3 to include the ballet school, setting up for this. In between he wrote or co-wrote ARMY OF THE DEAD, ARMY OF THIEVES, DAY SHIFT, JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4, REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE and REBEL MOON – PART TWO: THE SCARGIVER. (For my part I watched all but one of those movies so I have also been fairly productive in my own way during that period.)

I’ve seen different criticisms of John Wick’s part in the story – I too am unclear how it fits into his timeline, after debunking my initial assumption that PARABELLUM must’ve established him owing the Ruska Roma a favor for punching his ticket. But this is what I love about it: the revisionist scenes where we learn that Eve was somewhere unseen witnessing those events in part 3 and then stopped John Wick on his way out to have a conversation in the hallway is silly on the level of Jeremy Renner’s character seeing Jason Bourne’s name carved in a cabin bunk bed in THE BOURNE LEGACY. It feels just short of not being able to get Reeves and cutting in unused footage and a back-of-the-head double – ha ha, what a chintzy way to connect these movies. So later on when John Wick shows up as an actual integrated character with action scenes and everything (I like when a goon says, “This is suicide, that’s fucking John Wick!”) it feels like a magic trick.

For me his inclusion was a thrill, but it’s very much Eve’s movie, and de Armas owns it, definitely appearing to have put Reeves-level work into her stunt training. I don’t know how convincing she is as a ballerina (which is a surprisingly small part of the movie), but it sure looks cool to see a short lady in fashionable outfits outmaneuvering and outlasting I don’t know – many dozens? a few hundred? – deadly enemies for 2 hours. She’s a legit actress who can do many things but she must really like action because she’s taken a few swings at it, and this feels like her coming into her own. I know it’s not a huge hit so far but my fingers are crossed that one day soon we’ll get a movie FROM THE WORLD OF EVE MACARRO.

Note: Although I disagree with some of her conclusions about the quality of the movie, the podcast Going Rogue’s BALLERINA episode is really informative about the movie’s history, including how different Hatten’s spec script was and which parts were reshoots.