Movie Review: Ballerina

Let me just start out with this, I did not hate Ballerina, I just think there were a lot of mistakes made that don't line up with what we expect from John Wick as a franchise. The film feels anachronistic, like despite the fact that it takes place concurrently with and slightly after John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, it should have come out in 2017 after John Wick: Chapter 2, when the franchise was evolving into what it is now. It's not bad, it's just not to the standards of the rest of the franchise which makes the movie struggle to stand out, even among other action movies released this year.

The biggest failing of the movie comes from an overload of exposition, most of which is frontloaded. Eve's father's death takes too long to get to, and the action sequence leading up to it is nothing special. Once The Director adopts Eve, we can also just skip directly to her first mission that looks like at it takes place at the Aggro Crag from GUTS because the audience knows how intensive this program is, considering it gave birth to John Wick. We essentially have four movies of training montage already so any screentime showing Eve learn to fight is basically pointless. From there until the big action sequence with the flamethrowers, there is nothing memorable about the movie from an action perspective.

The other weird thing the movie does is spend a lot of time telling you that the bad guys are bad because they're a cult of anarchists who don't believe in the rules of the high table. This is exposition that is not entirely necessary since we have three entire movies about how important the rules are so just showing the cult conduct business at The Continental and attacking during one of the weapon showcase sequences is really all you need to show that they don't respect the rules without beating us over the head with it multiple times in explicit dialogue.

It's strange to me that we are living in the era we are, not politically or anything, just in terms of the fact that Marvel Studios isn't quite the juggernaut that it was six years ago, that Lionsgate would try the same thing Marvel did after Avengers: Endgame. John Wick: Chapter 4 is a perfect send-off to the franchise, but studios still need to make money so a series can't just die anymore. Two years removed, we get a spin-off prequel to that finale that is designed to lay the groundwork for that franchise to continue, but it doesn't 100% line up with the timeline and sometimes loses sight of what people love about this series. It even feels like the film should have come out years ago, but it didn't for whatever reason. This is just John Wick's Black Widow, but Ballerina doesn't have the room for error that Marvel did in 2021, coming off Endgame, or the goodwill of being one of the first major theatrical releases since COVID caused theaters to shut down.

Unfortunately, Ballerina just confirms what was suspected about the John Wick franchise, without the fantastic and memorable action sequences, all that's left behind are moderately interesting action movies. To put it in perspective, I was bored watching Ballerina in a way I was not in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning.

★★★★

Ballerina - From The World of John Wick
Directed by: Len Wiseman
Written by: Shay Hatten, Derek Kolstad
Starring: Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Norman Reedus
Release Date: June 6th, 2025
Rating: R