‘Ballerina’ Review: A Surprisingly Successful ‘John Wick’ Spinoff

Google “Ballerina movie reshoots” and you get all kinds of articles about the protracted production of the first John Wick spinoff feature. This much is undisputed: In 2017, Lionsgate acquired a spec script about a ballerina who moonlights as an assassin with designs on repurposing it as a John Wick movie. They offered a glimpse of these killer dancers in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, and then put the spinoff into production in late 2022.

But John Wick: Chapter 3 came out in 2019, and John Wick: Chapter 4 followed in 2023. Meanwhile, Ballerina languished in an editing room somewhere. It finally arrives in theaters this summer, almost three years after its initial shoot, and well over two years since co-star Lance Reddick passed away.

In the interim, Lionsgate ordered at least one batch of reshoots, although how much of Ballerina’s final cut consists of those reshoots — and who directed them — is the subject of all those Googleable rumors. Len Wiseman helmed Ballerina’s initial production. Longtime John Wick filmmaker Chad Stahelski supposedly oversaw at least some of those reshoots, although in one interview he claimed he only did “a couple of weeks” of work where they “changed some of the action sequences and made up for some time that Len just didn’t have.”

Lionsgate

I have no inside information to offer, only my reaction to the finished film, which feels like two distinct movies smooshed together in the editing room. The first half of Ballerina feels like a dour, sluggish John Wick knockoff, one that mimics this franchise’s stylistic trappings but totally whiffs on the joyful exuberance with which it approaches its trademark fight scenes. Then around the midpoint of this two hour movie, it’s like a switch gets flipped, and the rest of Ballerina is an absolute blast — with at least three different set pieces as exciting and clever and darkly hilarious as anything in the four previous John Wick movies.

That’s also the part of Ballerina that features John Wick himself, Keanu Reeves, albeit in a small supporting role. The protagonist of this particular tale is Eve (Ana de Armas), one of those dancing hit women from John Wick: Chapter 3. Ballerina actually restages the scene from Chapter 3 set in and around the deadly ballet troupe, inserting Eve as an observer who asks John Wick for some advice about the life of a gun for hire. It also flashes back to Eve’s childhood to provide her with a tragic backstory to mirror Wick’s own dead puppy, and to motivate her quest for revenge against another shadowy cult led by a sinister figure known only as “The Chancellor” (Gabriel Byrne).

These scenes only occasionally work. They’re stiffly paced and often abruptly edited; sequences stretch on and on and then suddenly leap ahead to another location. In between some stock shootouts, John Wick veterans like Ian McShane and Anjelica Huston expound upon the nature of fate and morality. There are monologues about how a single bullet could change the entire world — a very strange message from a movie like Ballerina where hundreds of rounds of ammunition are fired in almost every scene to very little effect. The action sequences in this early section contain plenty of violence with guns and with knives, but almost none of the playful wit that typically distinguishes John Wick from its lesser imitators.

Lionsgate

Then Eve gets a lead on the Chancellor’s location, and follows his trail through several European locales. At that point, Ballerina becomes a frenetic sprint to the finish. The rambling speeches about right and wrong, the murky underworld politics; basically anything that involves characters talking about their feelings or their lives gets jettisoned in favor of one wildly inventive fight after another.

Under other circumstances, I might complain about a film that abandons what few themes and ideas it possesses in favor of non-stop stunts and explosions. But Ballerina does not contain ordinary movie violence; its second half elevates the art of film action to pure visual poetry. Some sequences shock the viewer with their brutality; others make them laugh with their sly whimsical flourishes. A few — like a duel involving flamethrowers that surely qualifies as the most literal firefight in cinema history — manage to do both, and made me very glad the Academy Awards decided to finally add an Oscar for Best Stunt Design.

De Armas is a capable action hero; anyone who saw her small but memorable turn in the last James Bond film, No Time to Die, knows that. Like Reeves, she spends most of her movie right in the middle of the gnarliest action and stunts; punching, stabbing, shooting, and, in her case, flamethrowing. She doesn’t quite bring the same level of stoic soulfulness to Eve as Reeves does to Wick, though, something that’s all the more noticeable in Ballerina when they briefly share the screen together.

Lionsgate

Reeves’ haunted presence elevated the mainline John Wicks beyond simple thrillers. Ballerina never quite gets to that level, but the fact that it isn’t a disastrous mess, given its endless post-production, feels like an achievement in and of itself. Whoever directed this movie, especially that terrific second half, did a hell of a job.

Additional Thoughts:

-A bunch of pirouetting young women who regularly trade their toe shoes for shotguns made for a striking image when it was just a quirky detail in the background of John Wick’s surreal underworld. Ballerina does surprisingly little to expand upon that concept; after Eve completes her training with Huston’s Director, the fact that she can walk en pointe doesn’t factor into the film at all. It’s not like she uses a ballerina gig as cover for wetwork, nor does she incorporate ballet moves into her fight scenes. As with other elements of John Wick’s elaborate mythology — like those the gorgeous Continental hotels frequented only by hit men who pay for everything with gold coins — these ideas don’t hold up to intense scrutiny.

-Speaking of things that work best when you don’t explain them: Much of Ballerina’s second half takes place in a remote ski town somewhere in the Alps. Without spoiling what and who Eve finds there, I will say that I don’t know if I have ever seen a film locale that reminded me so much of Parmistan, the fictional Eastern European country from the 1985 action film Gymkata. In that film, an Olympic gymnast becomes a CIA agent and then winds up in the “Village of the Crazies,” where seemingly every resident wants to kill him and all of the local architecture doubles as gymnastics equipment. As I happen to consider Gymkata one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, please take this comparison in the spirit in which it was intended — namely, as high praise.

RATING: 7/10