When Ana de Armas showed up for a single sequence in the 2021 James Bond movie No Time to Die, it gave the somewhat sluggish movie a jolt of energy, thanks to her lively, playful performance as a rookie CIA agent tasked with helping Daniel Craig's Bond on a mission in Cuba. That brief but memorable appearance made a convincing case for de Armas as the star of her own action movie.
She follows through on that promise with the John Wick spinoff Ballerina, but there's almost none of the sly charm that she brought to her No Time to Die role. Instead Ballerina is just as grim and grandiose as the later John Wick movies, with de Armas playing a stoic killer in the mode of Keanu Reeves' formidable assassin. De Armas' Eve Macarro isn't a legend like John Wick, but she's otherwise cut from the same cloth, with the same single-minded focus on revenge.
For John, it started with a dog that was a gift from his late wife. For Eve, it begins when she's a child, and her father is killed by a criminal faction led by the man known as the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). Young Eve is befriended by John's old pal Winston Scott (Ian McShane), who offers her the chance to train with the Ruska Roma, the mercenary organization where both John and Eve's father learned their trade (and which is also inexplicably a ballet school).
Twelve years later, Eve is a fully trained Ruska Roma operative ready for her first mission, and also ready to take on the man responsible for her father's murder. Like John, she goes against the extensive established rules of the ever-expanding assassin underworld, which put her at odds with the Director (Anjelica Huston), the leader of the Ruska Roma.
It's a rather perfunctory revenge story, with one meager late-film twist, and a stock motivation that feels less personal than John's puppy-based quest, even if it involves an actual human family member. De Armas looks fantastic and clearly trained well for her action sequences, but there's no depth to her character, nothing like the sense of history that Reeves brought to John in the series' first movie.
Instead, there's more of the byzantine mythology that has weighed down the recent installments, which are full of secret organizations and hidden sanctuaries. The Chancellor's group, which other characters refer to as a cult, is such a super duper secret organization that apparently no one could even mention it before. The expansion of the John Wick "universe," which includes the already forgotten 2023 Peacock prequel TV series The Continental, is tedious and often laughable, and Reeves' extended guest appearance as John comes off as desperate pandering.
But what about the action? That's what audiences really come to these movies for, and to its credit, Ballerina offers plenty. Primary series director Chad Stahelski reportedly came aboard as the uncredited director of substantial reshoots, and there's one early set piece that's blatantly been inserted to increase the action quotient, with no bearing on previous or subsequent events. It's still cool to see Eve take out bad guys in a neon-lit nightclub full of ice sculptures, though, so the plot relevance doesn't quite matter.
The final third of the movie takes place in a remote snowy mountain village, with lots of opportunities for impressive battles, and credited director Len Wiseman (making his first feature since 2012) finds numerous ways to pit Eve against the bad guys. It's solid work that never reaches the heights of the most memorable John Wick action sequences, and it lacks the momentum and intensity of the storytelling in the early Wick chapters.
Byrne makes for an ineffectual villain, and Huston and McShane primarily function as exposition delivery systems. De Armas proves that she can carry an action movie, but she's always operating in Reeves' shadow, especially when they share the screen. In No Time to Die, she stole the movie, but in Ballerina, there isn't much to steal.
Ballerina
Rated R
Directed by Len Wiseman
Starring Ana de Armas, Gabriel Byrne, Anjelica Huston
