You’ve got to hand it to the title—Ballerina: From the World of John Wick sounds like a crossover between a tiara-clad Disney fantasy and a headshot-heavy gun-fu opera. And misdirection is the whole point. This isn’t pirouettes and pliés—it’s flamethrowers, samurai swords, and body bags.
Positioned neatly between John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and Chapter 4, Ballerina follows a new assassin with pointe shoes and a vendetta, played by Ana de Armas. It wants to deepen the John mythos with a feminine touch and emotional weight, but ends up oscillating between promising detours and recycled chaos. Stylish, yes. Coherent? Not always.
As a child, Eve Macarro (played in her younger years by Victoria Comte) witnesses her father’s brutal murder by a cult led by the icy and inscrutable Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). She’s whisked away by Winston (Ian McShane) to the Ruska Roma—a ballet school-slash-hitman factory overseen by the iron-willed Director (Anjelica Huston). There, Eve learns arabesques, handguns, and how to turn a pair of ice skates into weapons of mass destruction.
Years later, when Eve recognizes a familiar symbol on one of her targets, she disobeys orders and embarks on a revenge spree that threatens a longstanding truce between her group and the Chancellor’s. What follows is a trail of carnage leading to a snow-covered village full of cultists, one morally ambiguous hitman (Norman Reedus), and a final showdown involving flamethrowers, grenades, and more bruised larynxes than dialogue exchanges.
The good
Ana de Armas is clearly the film’s MVP. With her understated calm and crisp physicality, she brings a compelling screen presence to Eve—even when the script forgets to give her character actual layers. The action, especially a 20-minute mid-film sequence that plays with structure and stakes, offers a glimpse of what the spin-off could have been if it weren’t tethered so tightly to the Wick playbook.
Visually, the film is as slick as you’d expect. Neon-drenched nightclubs, Eastern European rooftops, and dimly lit safehouses all look like they’re borrowed from a stylish fever dream. The choreography, executed by a team of Wick alumni, delivers some technically sharp set pieces—even if we’ve seen many of them before.
And while its thematic flirtation with “feminine” violence—using intellect and agility over brute strength—is more talked about than shown, there’s at least an attempt to carve out a new identity. Plus, the final track titled Fight Like a Girl by Evanescence and K.Flay is the kind of bombastic closer you expect from a film that confuses ballet slippers with brass knuckles.
The bad
Despite its best efforts to stand on its own toes, Ballerina keeps falling back into the John Wick formula like a dancer repeatedly slipping off pointe. The revenge arc, meant to fuel Eve’s transformation, is sketched so thinly it barely registers. Emotional beats are hinted at and then dropped faster than a spent magazine.
While the film suggests Eve should “fight differently,” the choreography tells a different story. The punches, the shootouts, the nightclub brawls—they’re nearly identical to scenes in John Wick’s saga, just with a slightly different manicure. Even the camera movements feel like déjà vu, only with less polish in the editing bay.
Norman Reedus’s cameo feels like a setup for a different, more interesting movie. And Keanu Reeves, while present, mostly drops in to grunt, reload, and remind us of how well he wears a bulletproof suit.
The verdict
Ballerina isn’t a bad film. It’s just a familiar one wearing a different costume. There are sparks of originality, and Ana de Armas proves she can lead an action franchise—but the movie remains conflicted about whether it wants to honour the John Wick legacy or evolve from it.
At its best, it’s a brisk, bloody spin-off with style to spare. At its worst, it’s a cover version of a John Wick hit single, played just slightly off-beat. Ballet may be about grace, precision, and control—Ballerina has two of those things. Just not always in the right order.
