Swan Lake of Blood | Ballerina (2025) Review – With Eyes East

Directed by Len Wiseman
Starring Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne

Light spoilers for Ballerina, John Wick: Chapter 4

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is a strong contender for “movie with the worst title of the year,” and incidentally, the subtitle (supertitle?) is both strength and weakness. My question, from the moment the film was announced in 2019, was “Why does this have to be a spin-off?” There’s nothing about a ballerina-turned-assassin that screams John Wick any more than it does La Femme Nikita or 2023’s own Ballerina, though the lead character in that one wasn’t the titular ballerina. In fact, 2025’s Ballerina starts on the most stock-standard note: her father is killed, and she seeks revenge. That’s every action movie! It’s also why the original John Wick was such a breath of fresh air: action movies are bad.

If film is a dialogue, this was the opening sequence:

“You see this father and his young daughter?”
“Yeah.”
“Care about them.”
“No.”
“They’re under attack.”
“That’s a shame.”
“He’s dead. She’ll want revenge.”
“Can’t be helped.”

That’s such a hard road, dude. Trying to get me to care about people within seconds of meeting them? It can be done, they just have to be interesting. What do we know about this father and his young daughter? She likes to dance, he loves his daughter, her sister is gone, he’s going away somewhere. And he’s rich? Who is this guy? Well, that’s part of a third-act reveal, so we’re actually obfuscating potentially characterizing details up front. Series regular Winston soon enters the picture, offering the young girl – Eve – the promise of a new family. In this way, surprisingly, Eve’s journey into the World of John Wick isn’t framed by revenge. She’s taken in by the Director, head of the Ruska Roma, an organization of super-elite bodyguards. Thankfully, this isn’t another situation where it’s assassin versus Continental/High Table, which is the narrowest interpretation of the first film’s lore.

I think that the next two sequences are better than average, but they are: training montage and first mission, so there’s plenty to measure them against. I was definitely thinking of The Villainess – more overtly referenced by Chapter 3 – and not just because of the sudden Korean injection when a wild Sooyoung appears (bizarrely dubbed over in English, for her grunts and single half-line of dialogue). The montage features maybe the first mainstream utterance of “girls may be smaller, but strength isn’t the only thing that matters,” though it’s spoken as a near-quote of something Morpheus once said: “Do you think strength has anything to do with winning or losing?” or something like that. Once again, Chapter 3 already quoted The Matrix directly, so go for it if you need to. And then the first mission takes place in an ice level, so the combatants are slip-sliding around and taking some nasty falls.

Then there’s a two-month time skip. In the first of a few subversive moments, Eve exits a scene and we start to zoom out over a city street before she’s violently pulled back in. Here, she learns that the men who killed her father are still out there. Now her revenge story begins, which somewhat confounds me. It might be the long-delayed film’s proximity to the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us, but I can see that this is a character who isn’t propelled through the story. What’s driving her through the training montage? She first fails and then learns and succeeds, and the first mission is a demonstration of that lesson – I like being educated in how to read a fight scene – so it’s all in order, but it’s missing an oomph. It’s missing affect.

I can’t be sitting here thinking, “Yep, that makes sense, yep, that makes sense,” nodding along to every plot point. “Revenge for your father? It is forbidden!” “Well, I’m gonna do it anyway!” Come on, guys. Now, this is only paraphrased from a scene between the Director, whose singular trait is “grumpy,” and Eve, who doesn’t have a trait. Fortunately, this is where the movie begins to bend toward the World part, if you were wondering why I was just telling you what happens in the movie beat for beat in the above paragraphs. Undoubtedly, the movie gets more interesting as it goes along. But if we can rewind to more than ten years ago, part of why the original John Wick worked so well was its interaction with the audience on a metatextual level. You rooted for John Wick because dogs are great but also because Keanu was back. Even more than Neo, this was the ultimate Keanu role. At that point, we’re not judging an actor’s performance with standard metrics – nor a character’s writing.

For the former, there are flashes of Ana de Armas looking mean and scary and that’s great, but for the latter, she’s given about as much to work with as any John Wick support player. Think Common, Halle Berry, Mark Dacascos, and so on, who never had “arcs,” but got by on big personalities. Eve is a little bit sarcastic here and there, but she’s also something anomalous in the World of John Wick: a do-gooder. When her trainee friend goes missing, she bursts into the room with her direct superior and the Director and shouts, “Where is she?!” Guys. She’s just harder to root for, despite that de Armas is otherwise convincing in such a physically demanding role. In the action, she’s brutal and tactical and improvisational; I only wish her character reflected that. Single-minded, like a force of nature. When the villain tells her “This is over,” on the phone, she has to say something like “I’m just getting started,” because she lives for this shit, not “It’s not over until you’re dead.” I mean, that’s like the pianist passed out on the keys.

It’s the difficulty of the spin-off. We have this new character assuming a role that simply cannot be replicated. There are stars who could make a Reeves-esque “comeback,” though part of his comeback’s success was that he never really went away. Or at least, he was never sent away. It’s not the role for a relatively new star, being so reliant on celebrity and lore, with John Wick playing on our love of The Matrix, Speed, Point Break, and so on. Ana de Armas is in a position like Charlize Theron with Atomic Blonde, or Bob Odenkirk with Nobody. Those movies aren’t calling back to previous action roles (though Theron’s got them, to be fair), they’re written differently. Eve is the same silent badass as John Wick, but whenever she does exhibit her bursts of personality, she clearly has a lot on her mind. Silence isn’t the right fit. This film also features John Wick, at his most mythic here, almost ghostly. In my brain, he’s become unstuck in time, because I have no idea where this fits into Chapter 3, and he’s wise rather than driven. It seems like he’s learned the ultimate lesson of Chapter 4, despite that those events have yet to occur.

Yes, he’s a highlight of the movie. Of course, the real draw is the inventive action set pieces, and while they always feel affected in some way, they’re undeniably fun and creative. One of the trailers spoiled the flamethrower, but its use within the John Wick gun language was surprising. These set pieces often peak with the series’ signature dark comedy, with grunts who don’t die or goofy prop work or almost Rube Goldberg scenes of orchestrated chaos that invoke the old silent era (Buster Keaton getting a shout-out in a scene of death by remote control). The handle on tone isn’t as tight as in previous installments, but there’s still something to being in on the joke. When Daniel Bernhardt walks through the door, I can’t help but smile. Sure, he played a character who died in the first movie, but why would that mean we can’t see Daniel Bernhardt again?

Much has been made of the behind-the-scenes drama (of the Rogue One rather than It Ends with Us variety), and while the movie is never incoherent, it does feel like a script adapted to fit in the John Wick sandbox – which it appears to be. To my earlier question, there’s almost nothing that the license adds to the story. In most action movies, when the hero needs guns, they visit “somebody with guns,” but in Ballerina, it’s a gun sommelier like from Chapter 2. My God, I realize, this is a franchise picture. Am I eating McDonald’s in Paris? Were there ambitions in the script snuffed out by continuity curation? One of the final locations in the film is an isolated village full of – you guessed it – assassins, and That Is So John Wick. But it means that Eve goes to war with a town, and that’s pretty hardcore.

This is why we’re watching, but I can’t stress enough the difference that story makes. Ballerina has more of the best action choreography Hollywood ever produced, but it’s closer to sound and fury than the maniac highs of Chapters 3 and 4. I’ve heard that Chad Stahelski came back to do reshoots without the original director’s involvement – Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake is one weird hill I’ll die on – but there were deeper problems in the bones of the film that couldn’t be solved by better fight scenes or more Keanu Reeves or whatever it was. So, unlike any other movie about a vengeance seeker – even a ballerina – it’s an awfully convoluted route to the business, but business is booming. Like a grenade in the mouth.