‘Ballerina' review: Ana de Armas' John Wick spinoff has good fights, bad everything else

New York Post

14 hours ago

movie review FROM THE WORLD OF JOHN WICK: BALLERINA
Running time: 125 minutes. Rated R (strong/bloody violence throughout, and language). In theaters.
Even assassins get a universe now.
Continuing the weedy sprawl of a franchise that hardly needs it is 'From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,' an origin-to-revenge story about Eve, a dancer and a paid murderer played by Ana de Armas.
Call her Killing Eve II.
Or Wick the Worse.
The first four 'John Wick' films, starring Keanu Reeves, are fantastic and artful orgies of death with stunner locations such as Sacré-Cœur stairs in Paris and the Moroccan desert. The imagery is often breathtaking, and Reeves' steely resolve more than makes up for the thinness of the plots.
Too bad 'Ballerina' drops the ball. Despite being led by an actress who once took on the role of Marilyn Monroe, it's a much less attractive movie — downright ugly sometimes. The fights are as brutal and thrilling as they should be: knives to the face, hammers to the face, grenades to the face.
The face always loses.
But the tale of Eve, whose assassin father was offed before she was taken to the Ruska Roma in New York to be trained in the dark arts by a phoning-it-in Anjelica Huston, is a recycled schlep. A blah de bourrée. This Len Wiseman-directed flick is 45 minutes shorter than 'John Wick 4,' but spiritually, it's longer than jury duty.
3 Eve (Ana de Armas) goes on a hunt for her father's killer in 'Ballerina.'
©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection
As a boring adult, Eve learns to pirouette and execute.
'Fight like a girl,' her teacher tells her. What a script!
She obsessively stares at a toy ballerina from her childhood that spins as music from 'Swan Lake' plays. It's a tad on the nose — or beak, as it were.
All the while, she is dead set on finding the baddies responsible for doing in her dad 12 years earlier. All she knows is that the men have an 'X' scar on their wrists.
The journey to subdue Mr. Ex is basically a bar crawl.
3 De Armas' acting leaves something to be desired.
Whereas John Wick traveled to exotic places and fought in architecturally fun spaces — museums filled with mirrors and glass, art-deco vaults — much of 'Ballerina' takes the aughts route of 'Alias' with Jennifer Garner: nightclubs.
There's shootout after shootout in implausible nntz-nntz dancefloors. Everywhere Eve goes has a whiff of Berlin.
Except, that is, the one place that finally perks up our depressed eyeballs. Her rogue search takes her to a creepily quiet, snowy village in Austria, where it turns out every resident is an assassin. A blood-soaked Stepford.
The best skirmish happens inside a lodge-y restaurant there, where, it turns out, the cook is a professional killer. The dastardly chef wants to make schnitzel out of Eve.
Soon after comes a groaner of a battle, in which Eve combats a flame-thrower-wielding blond man with a water hose.
3 Keanu Reeves briefly returns as John Wick.
De Armas has never been much of an actress. She's more of a presence. The Cuban-Spanish performer got by in the horrific Monroe monstrosity 'Blonde' by being effervescent.
Eve is, like Wick, deceptively complex. On the outside, she's a blank slate. However, while Reeves' character suggests a storm raging beneath his cool surface, de Armas' interior has a neon 'Vacancy' sign hanging up.
Other well-liked actors from the Wickiverse return.
Lance Reddick, who died in 2023, makes his final screen appearance as Charon, and Ian McShane is back as Winston, the Continental Hotel's dapper boss. They're joined by a mighty roster of character actors: Gabriel Byrne as the evil Chancellor and Norman Reedus as an assassin on the run. Everybody, though, gives their B-game for 'Ballerina.'
Even Reeves pops by for what is, unfortunately, an adequate adventure.