‘From the World of John Wick: Ballerina’ Review: Ana de Armas Slays

You’ve got to love Anjelica Huston, wearing pounds of power jewelry and Cher-strength makeup as a Ruska Roma crime queen known only as “The Director,” putting a young ballet student through her pirouette paces until her toes have bled clean through her satin pointe shoes. “Tend to your wounds before you get sepsis and we have to cut off your feet,” the Director intones in a lugubrious Belarusian accent. If the dizzying crescendo of intricately choreographed fight scenes is the main attraction in Ballerina, it’s those occasional moments of dry humor that make it a welcome extension of the John Wick universe.

Director Len Wiseman and screenwriter Shay Hatten don’t try to reinvent the wheel, which turns out to be a good thing in a movie that switches out its protagonist but otherwise is very much of a piece with the previous four films in the high-intensity gun fu franchise, which has grossed north of $1 billion worldwide.

If you’re worried about missing Keanu Reeves’ monotonal delivery as the taciturn hitman, fear not. He stops by just long enough to waste a bunch of would-be killers and drop a few uninflected buzzwords like “choice,” “rules” and “consequences.” John also reconfirms his fidelity to well-tailored black-on-black business attire by showing that outerwear is not a requirement, even in a snow-covered Alpine village with winds coming off a glacial lake.

Ably stepping in for Keanu’s John is another elite assassin trained by the Ruska Roma, Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), a character first glimpsed in John Wick: Chapter 3: Parabellum. In between those punishing ballet classes, Eve is kept busy by chief instructor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) with shooting and martial arts training until she’s taking down guys twice her size on the mats.

Her shared heritage with Wick — who was raised by surrogate mother the Director as Jardani Jovonovich — is evident in their matching Latin back tattoos. His reads “Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat” (“Fortune Favors the Bold”), while hers is “Lux in Tenebris” (“Light in Darkness”), complemented later with the addition of a winged angel bound to a cross. Like John, she also earns a nickname out of Slavic folklore: He’s “Baba Yaga,” she’s “Kikimora,” a spirit who can be avenger or protector. (I kept wondering who’s next: “Tinky Winky?” “Chimichanga?”)

You’d be forgiven for thinking this all sounds like it was struck a little too schematically from the John Wick template. But you really want a radical reimagination of a series that has consistently delivered and has never pretended to be anything more than it is?

Many of us have been waiting for de Armas to sink her teeth into a substantial action role since her brief but tantalizing appearance as Cuban CIA agent Paloma in No Time to Die. She gets ample opportunity to make good on that promise here as a hardened but still vulnerable woman, as formidable in brutal mano a mano clashes as she is with a gun — as well as a whole range of ad hoc weaponry, including an ice pick, a grenade belt, a katana sword, a mallet, a TV remote, a firehose, a pair of ice skates and a flamethrower. De Armas followed Reeves’ lead by throwing herself into the fight training and doing as many of her own stunts as possible, helping to maintain the adrenaline rush that has always distinguished this series.

Hatten keeps the story simple, going back almost to the kind of kill-or-be-killed basics that made the first film, 2014’s John Wick, such a solid base on which to build. Whereas John sets out for revenge after thugs kill the dog that was a final gift from his late wife, Eve wants those responsible to pay for the death of her father Javier (David Castañeda), when she was just a child.

While both Charon (Lance Reddick in his last screen role) and Winston (Ian McShane) — respectively the concierge and owner of the New York Continental Hotel, home away from home for contract killers — are back, there’s mercifully much less of all that self-serious High Table arcana and Blood Oath Markers. Though of course the tattooed switchboard operators at HQ, posting updates on the bounty board, make an appearance or two.

Eve’s traumatic childhood loss is seen in an exciting opening sequence, in which divers with crossbows emerge from the sea and promptly wipe out guards at a splendid coastal villa. Ushering the young Eve (Victoria Comte) into a hiding place and reminding her she knows the drill, Javier proceeds to off most of the hit team with the quick-thinking skills of a trained killer and explosives expert. He comes close to defeat, when he’s overpowered and given a grave choice by a shady figure known as the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). But he regains the upper hand and gets Eve out of there, though not without sustaining a fatal bullet wound.

Eve is placed by Winston in the care of the Director, who recognizes the killer instinct forged out of pain and anger as the girl matures. Her first mission is to thwart an abduction plot. She aces the assignment in vintage franchise fashion by neutralizing wave upon wave of Asian gangsters who come at her with agile moves that seem to run the gamut from Muay Thai through Wushu and Ninjutsu to Silat. (Series creators Derek Kolstad and Chad Stahelski have always owed a debt to the fist-and-foot mayhem of The Raid and its sequel.)

Unsurprisingly, the setting is a dance club bathed in eye-searing neon and the clash is accompanied by thumping techno music, deftly integrated into Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard’s pulse-pounding synth score (along with an occasional whisper of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake). But the moody nightscapes pierced by saturated primary colors that have characterized much of the series give way to a different palette when the action shifts from the Continental in New York and then Prague to the picturesque Austrian village of Hallstatt, which turns out to be a kind of retirement community for killers, presided over by the Chancellor.

When an X seared into the wrist of a foiled assassin triggers memories of her father’s death, Eve goes to the Director for more intel. She learns that the mark identifies members of a cult who kill both for business and sport and have maintained a truce with the Ruska Roma for centuries. But Eve will not be deterred — neither by the Director’s orders nor Winston’s advice.

It’s fun for a change to see a woman at the center of so much death and destruction — Eve seems barely able to step into an establishment without leaving major wreckage and a body pileup in her wake. This is notably the case when she visits the elaborate emporium of high-end arms dealer Frank (an amusing Abraham Popoola), and even more so in a kitschy Hallstatt restaurant, where Eve learns never to trust a beer hall wench. De Armas doesn’t make the mistake of looking too composed, or making the vigorous smackdowns look effortless. She sweats and grunts and winces in pain, though it’s pretty astonishing how many violent body-slams she can take without breaking her back.

Hatten’s script throws family conflicts at her, with unexpected relations popping out of the woodwork, and she feels a kinship with Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus), a fugitive from the X cult he married into, who, like Eve’s father, wants to give his preteen daughter Ella (Ava McCarthy) a normal life. But the Chancellor doesn’t respond well to defections, especially those involving children, whom he regards as his own clay to mold. Not only does he unleash an entire township of killers on Eve, but she has to contend with a lethal emissary of the very pissed Director, too.

The fundamental difference between the John Wick films and Ballerina is that John won his freedom and spent four movies trying to escape his dark past, while Eve embraces it, showing no sign of hanging up her assassin’s hat in a final scene that clearly suggests a sequel.

As a protagonist, Eve doesn’t have the droll Zen vibe of Reeves’ John, showing her rage in a more obvious death stare, and she loses the tutu early, making the title seem somewhat arbitrary. But de Armas is a magnetic presence with all the right moves, and Wiseman’s muscular direction — along with DP Romain Lacourbas’ sleek visuals and an unrelenting pace that never lets up on the violence for long — make for mindless summer action entertainment with a lot of style.