The first 30 minutes of Len Wiseman’s From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (referred to as Ballerina from here on) is precisely what a fan of the franchise fears any sequel/sidequel/prequel not explicitly focused on Keanu Fucking Reeves would look like. As with The Continental, Lionsgate has vastly overestimated how much their audience gives a shit about the cool “World of Assassins” that Wick and his cohort inhabit, failing to realize it’s just window-dressing for great action major-league call-ups and new environments and fighting styles for our lead character to fight his way through. These opening minutes follow our protagonist, Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), as she gets orphaned, brought into the fold of that Russian mob front that Anjelica Huston was running in John Wick: Chapter Three – Parabellum (this series has to work on its titles), and slowly becomes an assassin through Krav Maga practice, firearms training, and pirouettes.
The action in those moments is aggressively mid. Eve’s first mission involves rescuing a woman from a group of gangsters who want to kidnap her from an ice-themed nightclub, which is somehow not owned by The Penguin, and it’s astonishing how out of place it feels within the Wick universe. I spent most of the choppily edited, barely coherent sequence thinking about how much De Armas’ dress, a sparkling red number, looked like the one she wore in her brief appearance in No Time to Die. That was a standout scene in a fantastic film, where she showcased her natural charisma and held her own alongside a cast of all-stars, including one of the best James Bonds to ever grace the screen. It would have been a bummer to see that all go to waste on her first above-title franchise solo feature, especially with the pedigree of the Wick series and its kinetic, witty action.
Thankfully, that studio-imposed prologue gives way to the actual film as it was probably pitched, in which de Armas’ character, a full-fledged badass, gets sucked into one of the funniest scenarios the Wick franchise has come up with and has to fight her way out of it. All of that prologue could have been avoided – imagine if the whole action sequence in which we watch The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), the leader of a Swiss death cult, execute her father had been dialogue or quick-cut flashbacks – and Wiseman could have started in third gear, with Eve arriving at a suspicious mountain resort. She’s there because the mystery men who killed her dad came for her mid-hit. Information is scant, and Huston’s character doesn’t want her going down that pathway. So, she cashed in all of her chips to get a few important pieces of information from Winston (Ian McShane) at the Continental, tracked down an ex-member (Norman Reedus) looking to get his daughter away from the group’s grasp, nearly got him killed, and had her cool “stocking up on arms” scene interrupted by goons. That’s led her to this mountain town where everyone is a killer, and everyone is out to kill her in those lovely little knit fisherman’s sweaters.
It’s when she disposes of these soldier-cult members that Ballerina takes off and escapes the surly bonds of that terrible first act. Eve’s only got a box of grenades to kill these guys, and she does so in ways typical of the Wick movies, with each encounter being slightly more ridiculous than the last until you’re watching guys explode while she takes cover in one fluid motion. Wiseman signed up for these sequences, not that expository bullshit, and they tap into a side of him that he was never quite able to explore back in the heyday of the Underworld series, which wore their Matrix influence proudly but could never quite escape from its… uh, good predecessor. The invention only continues from there, with the Wick tradition of inventing even more ridiculous forms of combat in subsequent franchise entries continuing unabated. If you’ve ever wanted to watch ice skates get used as a weapon without involving a stomach-churning on-ice accident during a hockey game, well, this is your movie. Flamethrower duels? Yeah, this is your movie. The wit and competence almost return at the same time, as if on cue.
Weirdly, whoever decided on the risk-mitigating prologue once had the confidence to greenlight this entire film from a spec script based on the trailer for Chapter Two (astonishingly, this isn’t an exaggeration). And I get it: it might seem strange to harp on a small section of a movie I otherwise liked. Yet, I think it’s perfectly emblematic of all the problems with shared-universe cinema, which Ballerina has emphasized in its full title before the colon. From the World of John Wick isn’t just a stylistic nightmare, it’s the most forceful announcement of a studio’s goals for a franchise feature since Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. The John Wick films were a fascinating aberration in the ‘10s because of how thoroughly they abandoned that framework – Reeves’ character entered into the world fully formed, with a clear motivation that could be summed up in a single sentence (they killed his dog!) and a whole host of hinted-at misdeeds and adventures. Everything else — the Continental staff*, the tatted-up operators issuing low-fi bounties to kill and get rich to, and the various ethnic tribes of gangsters and hitmen – was only successful because of those hooks. If the first film had taken the Ballerina approach to establishing its central character, the John Wick franchise would not have made it past that initial entry.
Yet, much like the core series, Ballerina will likely only get better with sequels now that all of that prologue is out of the way. I’ve long thought the Wick films improved once the revenge quest faded into the background and Chad Stahelski focused his attention on crafting action sequences that were both compelling and ridiculously entertaining, transforming Reeves into the platonic ideal of a modern-day action star, fighting the Indonesian action maestros with the whole Hollywood arsenal. Based on her work here, de Armas deserves that chance, as she plunges herself head-first into a whole host of shockingly complex and well-timed action sequences. She gets an entire kitchen’s worth of dishware smashed on her head and takes her lumps with charm and wit (when a bad guy complains that Eve broke her jaw, de Armas tosses back a “Well, it seems it still works.”). So, I’ll be genuinely hyped for From the World of John Wick: Ballerina – Chapter Two, even as I groan about the title from the first trailer post to the final review.
*RIP to Lance Reddick, who makes his final film appearance here, bringing all of the charm and wit to the few scenes he’s in here that he brought to all of his work.