Ballerina
This thriller 'from the world of John Wick' has been a long time in the making: over three years since its leading lady was announced and eight since the script was first optioned following reshoots and reports that franchise creator Chad Stahelski took an active hand alongside director Len Wiseman. Happily, it emerges at last with enough inventive action to stand alongside its murderous predecessors, and makes Ana de Armas into a likeable assassin hero – a phrase that makes more sense in her killer-filled world than our own.
She plays Eve, a girl orphaned by Gabriel Byrne's Chancellor. She is raised under the care of Anjelica Huston's director at a ballet school-stroke-assassin training academy, learning arts both delicate and deadly. But Eve never planned to simply make her living punching people's tickets: she has vengeance in mind. So far, so standard revenge plot: a nice twist here is that when her desire threatens all-out war between her tribe and the Chancellor's, Keanu Reeves' John Wick is pressed into action to stop her.
There's a bit of business with Norman Reedus, as a defector from the Chancellor's cult, and Catalina Sandino Moreno as a rival assassin, but that's largely beside the point. Any Wick-adjacent film comes with the expectation that extreme violence will be dispensed and kill shots administered with abandon, and there this film eventually delivers. After a faltering first mission, Eve gets the hang of things, as demonstrated wittily via the bloody aftermath of a killing spree a few months later.
You don't see enough flamethrower duels these days
But it's when she finds a clue about her past and sets off on her own hunt that the film comes to life. You don't see enough flamethrower duels these days, and there are pleasingly inventive scenes, with smashed plates in a restaurant kitchen and grenades used as close-quarter weapons, that make up for the by-the-numbers plotting. If it's not quite as visually distinct as the neon-soaked Wick movies, it's close enough thanks to some nifty red smoke bombs, deployed early on, and all that fire.
It helps that de Armas, like Reeves, makes a convincing ass-kicker: not invincible and prone to error, as befits a beginner, but formidable when she sets her sights on a target. Where Wick is reluctantly returning to the fray, wounded by loss and grief, she's all eagerness and rash enthusiasm, and must learn restraint. Well, some restraint. There are still flamethrowers to be fired up, after all, and idyllic mountain villages entirely peopled with murderers to be cleared out. This is a John Wick spinoff, after all.
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