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For a series that’s ostensibly about brutal, bloody vengeance and an increasingly inscrutable underworld of assassins and hoteliers, part of the magic of the John Wick movies is how quietly personal they are for star Keanu Reeves and series director Chad Stahelski. Wick, and his inability to leave his life as a killer behind, is essentially a metaphor for Reeves’ career, and the movies’ use of well-choreographed action scenes is a tribute to Stahelski’s history as a stunt performer (specifically Reeves’ stunt performer on the Matrix movies). So it would’ve been completely understandable — predictable and forgivable, even — if the series’ first major spin-off was a total disaster, but Len Wiseman’s From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is borderline miraculous for how it managed to avoid that fate.
Ballerina, which stars Ana de Armas as an assassin-in-training who briefly crosses paths with John Wick while on her own quest for vengeance, didn’t make a John Wick-level splash at the box office when it was in theaters earlier this year, but it was a major player on the VOD charts until recently. Now it’s the top performer on Starz according to FlixPatrol, handily beating lower-profile movies on the streamer like McVeigh, Pretty Thing, and Flight Risk. This is a well-deserved redemption for Ballerina, and it will hopefully help solidify the film’s legacy (and the potential of future John Wick spin-offs) in the future.
Is ‘John Wick’ Spin-Off ‘Ballerina’ a Secret Masterpiece?
Ballerina has a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is lower than any of the main Wick movies, but the point is that it’s better than it has any right to be, not that it’s better than any of the other movies. And the reason it’s so surprisingly good is that it’s actually a smarter approach to the material than simply “a different bankable star does John Wick stuff.” The movie (featuring series regulars Ian McShane and Lance Reddick, plus newcomer Norman Reedus) knows that it can’t live up to exactly what John Wick does and that it will just reflect poorly on Ballerina if it tries too hard to do that, so it makes a few clever choices to sidestep any direct and unfavorable comparisons between it and the main series.
Early on, when Ana de Armas’ Eve is in training to become an assassin, an instructor explains to her that she’ll never be able to beat the male opponent she’s sparring against because he’s bigger and stronger than she is. In order to win, she has to fight smarter, which could be read as the movie’s philosophy about how it can compete against a regular John Wick movie — which is to say that it can’t compete unless it does things its own way. Later on, Eve goes to an arms dealer for what appears to be a clichéd “getting geared up” scene that initially evokes the far superior “Sommelier” scene in John Wick: Chapter 2, but then it quickly goes off in a different direction and becomes one of Ballerina’s funniest, most memorable action sequences.
Ballerina isn’t proof that just anyone can make a John Wick movie, because countless pretenders (Hotel Artemis, Gunpowder Milkshake, Kate) have tried and failed. It is, however, a lesson on how to make a John Wick-style movie work, which is by playing to your strengths rather than simply emulating what Reeves and Stahelski have spent their entire careers preparing for. Also, it helps that John Wick himself shows up a few times.
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