Ballerina

Blood on the Linoleum

I couldn’t tell you exactly where Len Wiseman’s movie ends and Chad Stahelski’s rescue operation begins in *Ballerina*, but you can feel the seams. For months before the 2025 release, the chatter around Lionsgate was that Stahelski had to come in and massively reshoot Wiseman’s *John Wick* spin-off just to get it across the line. The finished film wears that struggle on its face. It keeps straining against a sluggish revenge plot, trying to claw its way toward the sleek brutality this franchise trained us to expect. The whole Wick universe is starting to sag a little under its own mythology, honestly. But whenever the film starts to drown in that self-importance, Ana de Armas drags it back up.



De Armas has had this gear in her for a while—those ten minutes in *No Time to Die* were enough to prove it. Here, as Eve Macarro, she ditches that effortless Bond-era cool for something rawer and more desperate. That’s the smartest choice the movie makes. Eve is not just John Wick with a different silhouette. She bleeds, hesitates, misjudges things. Early on she gets told to "fight like a girl," which in this universe really means fight dirty, use leverage, and survive however you can. So when she shoots a man in the crotch, it doesn’t land like a gag. It lands like a practical decision from someone who knows she’s physically outmatched. De Armas sells the attrition of it all beautifully. After a kill, her shoulders sink. When she grabs some improvised weapon, she clutches it like it’s the last thing between her and drowning. She never feels invincible, which is why she feels dangerous.



The bigger problem is everything around her. Set between *John Wick: Chapter 3* and *Chapter 4*, the movie runs on a very standard revenge line, with Eve hunting down the people responsible for her father’s death and running into Gabriel Byrne’s vaguely sinister clan leader along the way. What used to be fun about this franchise—the weirdly baroque underworld bureaucracy—now sometimes feels like paperwork. Ian McShane shows up, Anjelica Huston shows up, Lance Reddick gets one last bittersweet appearance, and most of it registers as obligation rather than momentum. Rory Doherty at *Paste Magazine* had it right: the film "comes so suspiciously alive during its action sequences" that every pause for plot mostly reminds you how empty the connective tissue is.



Still, when the action does kick in, *Ballerina* suddenly has a pulse. The standout stretch in that snow-covered ski chalet town is vicious and inventive, especially once Eve turns an ice skate blade into a close-quarters weapon. Later she torches a whole cluster of henchmen with a flamethrower, bathing the neon in apocalyptic firelight. In those sequences, you can feel Stahelski’s influence cutting through Wiseman’s gloom. The camera finally backs off enough for the choreography to breathe. The rooms have shape. The violence has impact. For a few minutes, the thinness of the plot stops mattering.

I just wish the movie had the nerve to let Eve finish the job without a chaperone. Keanu Reeves drops in for a cameo that feels plainly mandated by executives worried the audience might wander off without the brand mascot. Wick hangs over the climax like a spectral safety net, and his presence steals some of Eve’s hard-won authority. She didn’t need the help. *Ballerina* is compromised and messy, a movie bruised by reshoots and studio nerves, but de Armas survives the whole thing on sheer force. She leaves behind the much more interesting question: what could she do if the franchise ever trusted her enough to go fully on her own?