Ana de Armas puts a fiercely feminine stamp on the wild world of John Wick
Ballerina
Starring Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Angela Huston & Gabrielle Byrne
Directed by Len Wiseman
Rated R
In theaters Friday, June 6
A little girl named Eve who dreams of becoming a ballerina grows up on a path of vengeful retribution in this rock ‘em, sock’em John Wick spinoff. Cuban-born Ana de Armas stars, throwing herself with gusto into the super-stylish ultra-violence, astronomically high body count and epic levels of combative extermination that have become franchise cornerstones.
And it’s not a John Wick movie, per se, but John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is also around for a stone-faced cameo that feels less like a plot necessity and more like a calculated nod and bit of connective tissue for faithful fans, who’ve pushed the four previous films—the first of which debuted more than a decade ago—into the rarified billion-dollar box-office zone.
De Armas showed her kickass bona fides as a James Bond associate in a memorable scene from No Time to Die (2021), and she also made lasting impressions in two Blade Runners, Knives Out and Blonde, for which she was Oscar nominated in her starring role as Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. But she’s a newbie to the off-the-charts action of Wicki-world, and she makes a scorcher of a debut. I found myself constantly marveling at the high-level skills behind all the controlled chaos of the stunts, the elaborately staged destruction, and the fantastical implausibility of anyone—like Eve—actually surviving the punishments she endures, and dishes out, onscreen.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” she’s asked at one point.
On Eve’s back is a tattoo reading “Lux en Tenebris,” which is Latin for “Light in the Darkness.” Just in case you miss it, she’s a force of good, fighting a dark cabal of death-dealing bad guys. Good thing she knows how—as the end soundtrack song by the rock band Evanescence reminds us—to “Fight Like a Girl.”
There’s not a lot of highfalutin pretenses to gum up all the ballistics, the bloody brawling and exploding bodies, despite the movie’s stridently fem-centric focus on family, fathers, daughters and fateful choices. “Are we going to die?” a young girl asks her papa. Let’s just say, if you’re in this movie, the odds are somewhat stacked against you, by just about whatever means you might imagine, including pistols, assault rifles, knives, pickaxes, hammers and hand grenades. There’s even an extended duel between flame throwers, and a restaurant brawl that weaponizes dinner plates. The final third of the movie is set in a snowy Czech village where everyone—even kids—is trained to kill.
The cast will look familiar to John Wick fans, with role-reprising turns from Gabriel Bryne, Ian McShane, Angelica Houston and Lance Reddick. And hey, there’s The Living Dead’s Norman Reedus, as an assassin with a big bounty on his head. The movie is a teeming immersion into a shady Euro fantasia, a subcultural alt-universe of diabolical criminal underworlds, life-and-death codes of conduct and—as fans are aware—a hotel franchise, the Continental, that caters only to killers. Would you like some hollow-point bullets with your room service omelet?
“When you deal in blood, there must be rules,” we hear from Eve’s mentor at the Ruska Roma, the German criminal “tribe” of gypsies that adopt the tiny dancer and turn her into a lethal weapon. And indeed, there’s a lot of bloody bang for your movie buck in Ballerina, particularly in de Armas’ full-throttle performance as a woman who’ll stop at nothing to get her revenge—with a gun, a knife, a hammer, duct tape, a flamethrower or a fire hose—as she widens and feminizes the fierce, ferociously wild world of John Wick.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 