Ballerina (2025)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Pirouette Pressure

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Len Wiseman's over-the-top, girl-powered action movie Ballerina (a.k.a. From the World of John Wick: Ballerina) could have benefitted from less backstory and tighter pacing, but it's still a great deal of crackerjack fun, full of surprises and welcome humor.

Young Eve is with her father (David Castañeda) when a squad of killers, led by The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), breaks in, bent on killing him. He gets Eve out, but is fatally wounded. She is sent to Ruska Roma, where she is taken in by The Director (Anjelica Huston) and trained. She grows into a young woman (Ana de Armas), learns ballet, firearms, and hand-to-hand combat, until she is finally ready to go out in the field.

After a job, she finds a man with an "X" scar on his wrist, a mark she recognizes from the men who killed her father. She asks The Director for more information, but is told that they are a dangerous group, and that a truce has been in place for centuries.

The truce must not be broken. Even so, Eve is determined to have her revenge, and — thanks to a tip from Winston (Ian McShane) at the Continental — traces The Chancellor to a deadly headquarters in a small snowy village. In order to prevent an all-out war, The Director has no choice but to send her best: John Wick (Keanu Reeves).

Ballerina is the fifth in the John Wick series, apparently set in and around the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, which explains the return of Reeves in a supporting role. But de Armas is the star, and she owns every second of it.

After a job, she exits the scene, retrieving a selection of knives from several corpses, getting on an elevator, going back for one more knife, and then checking herself in the mirror, and mopping a bit of blood from her forehead before re-emerging in a nightclub below. She takes a beating here, but she shows she has serious grit.

Director Len Wiseman (Underworld and sequels) has never been the most reliable of action directors, but he seems to have learned something from the Wick playbook, and turns in his clearest, sharpest, most exciting work yet.

The movie spends a little too much time setting things up, when simply getting off to a bang — as in the original John Wick — would have been snappier, but once it gets going, it goes great guns.

The showdown in the little snowy village with its winding walkways and slippery surfaces provides many exciting moments, but perhaps none more so than a showdown between a flamethrower and a firehose, male and female energy meeting head-on.

The Director's instructions to Eve, "fight like a girl," become this movie's mighty mantra (and a cool closing theme song). Twirling and pirouetting, Ballerina is a most welcome addition to the Wickian universe.