John Wick spin-off Ballerina sees Ana de Armas take up Keanu Reeves' search for revenge

Australia Broadcast Center

10-06-2025

Having finally laid its haggard hero to rest in 2023's John Wick: Chapter 4 (at least until John Wick 5 presumably picks up in hell), the franchise has now spun off into a new revenge saga led by Ana de Armas's fresh-faced assassin, Eve Macarro.
What: A John Wick spin-off featuring a young ballerina-assassin on a quest for revenge
Directed by: Len Wiseman
Starring: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Norman Reedus, Keanu Reeves
Where: In cinemas now
Likely to make you feel: Modestly thrilled
Ballerina is a film that should've come out last decade — and not just because its bisexual lighting and trite "fight like a girl" sloganeering feels more at home in 2016.
Alongside the series' four entries, its tidal wave of imitators (the best being Atomic Blonde, Nobody and Monkey Man) have already served up countless different flavours of Wick, often recapturing the same fluid style (if not the virtuosic choreography) of its genre-redefining action scenes.
The idea of a female ballerina assassin has also become an oddly specific trope in recent years, featuring in films like The Villainess, Red Sparrow and Black Widow. (Confusingly, the Wick-inspired Netflix movie Ballerina bucked this trend, with the lead being a former bodyguard.)
In fairness, the first John Wick was itself a grab-bag of genre conventions and borrowed archetypes — but it was nonetheless a clean slate. Rather than thread a new path through the assassin underworld of The High Table, Ballerina tunnels deeper into its laborious mythology — to disjointed ends.
Eve's tragic backstory is quickly dispatched. As the young daughter of a renegade assassin, she witnesses the execution of her father at the hands of his former tribe, though not before shooting one of the assailants dead.
Like Wick before her, she's taken in by the Ruska Roma, a formidable crime syndicate presided over by Anjelica Huston's cigar-chomping Director (previously seen in John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum), who sees in the traumatised orphan the makings of a stone-cold contract killer.
The film's prolonged opening stretch traces her years-long training in the cutthroat world of ballet (the front-facing business of the organisation), as well as the comparatively tame art of assassination. There's a brief, entirely perfunctory cameo from Wick, mostly to sync up Ballerina's timeline with his third outing, and to confirm Keanu Reeves' stamp of approval.
Eve's graduation ceremony takes the form of one of the series' recurring delights: a shoot-out at an ultra-exclusive club, this one a sub-zero fortress that could easily double as a Mr Freeze hideout.
As soon as the EDM kicks in (this time a Vivaldi remix, to class things up) and the firearm acrobatics start — with Eve gracefully launching herself onto henchmen and making judicious use of a decorative pick-axe — any misgivings begin to wane.
The film finally begins when the emerging assassin catches wind of the cult that ensnared her dad — and her professional duties take a back seat to her own personal vendetta.
Four years ago, de Armas shook up the staid thrills of Daniel Craig's Bond era as a glamorous CIA agent with a deadly high kick in No Time to Die — a performance that even sparked her own Bond casting rumours.
As Eve, however, much of her charisma is strangely toned down. The film initially suggests a new type of hero: a fledgling killer in opposition to Wick's feared legend. But it then writes its lead as both inexperienced and jaded, and primarily defines her by her tragic backstory.
For a franchise that's leaned heavily on its distinct characters and adroit casting — Halle Berry and Rina Sawayama instantly shone on screen in past instalments — there's little for de Armas, nor any other cast member, to work with.
Both Gabriel Byrne (Miller's Crossing) and Norman Reedus (The Walking Dead) are visibly phoning it in as a fatalistic mastermind and another errant cult member, respectively.
At least de Armas acquits herself well with the complex set-pieces, offering a more elegant physicality than Reeves.
The action feels much closer to the lower stakes of the first film than the epic high-concept showdowns of its sequels, but director Len Wiseman (the Underworld series) still faithfully replicates the series' tight rhythms. He finds unpredictable, often comic ways to escalate close-quarters scuffles, and knows when to embellish a fight with cartoonish splatter.
As always, the creative weaponry offers no shortage of novelty. Drink glasses in the John Wick films solely exist to be smashed over faces. Ice skates slit necks in a pinch. Claymores? Say less.
By the time Eve discovers an alpine village populated entirely by assassins (children included) and becomes embroiled in a flamethrower duel, the film never lets up as a rollicking good time.
Ballerina was first announced eight years ago, and its creative difficulties, exemplified by its extensive reshoots, are all too apparent. The prior films always had a built-in cheat by making a point of Wick's Sisyphean quest to escape the criminal world, allowing the character to more-or-less end up where each sequel began.
But should the cinematic universe of John Wick continue to expand — and de Armas truly does deserve to lead her own action series — it needs new ideas, fast.