ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Ana de Armas stars as killer ballerina assassin Eve in John Wick spin-off “Ballerina.”
“BALLERINA” (2025, 125 min., directed by Len Wiseman)
“Ballerina,” clunkily marketed as “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” to emphasize its ties to the Keanu Reeves franchise, stars Ana de Armas as ballerina-turned-assassin Eve Macarro in a pretty fun stunt work showcase. For long-time John Wick fans, the film is set around the events of 2019’s “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” and there are a few fun nods to the franchise at large. For everyone else, don’t worry: prerequisite knowledge of anything to do with the character is off the High Table, other than an understanding of Wick’s reputation and cool factor.
Before the movie settles into the guns, stunts and throat punches its franchise is famous for, the script, cobbled together by a murderer’s row of screenwriters, makes a few throat-clearing gestures at a plot. The film begins with a cliché action hero origin story: a younger version of the de Armas character, Eve, witnesses her father’s murder by a dastardly, mysterious mobster, but escapes his clutches with a pledge for vengeance and a wind-up ballerina toy. The sequence goes on for forever and is the least interesting part of the film. Fortunately for us, it’s all uphill from there. For the rest of act one, we see Eve, now played by an adult de Armas, advancing through the training regime of the Ruska Roma assassin enclave and executing their missions. Thanks to a few particularly brutal sequences early on, the audience quickly gets a sense of Eve as a character and her incredible capacity for cool-looking violence…