Ballerina
Director: Len Wiseman
Writer: Shay Hatten
Spin-off from: John Wick
Cast: Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ava Joyce McCarthy, Juliet Doherty, Norman Reedus, Lance Reddick, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, David Castañeda, Victoria Comte
Seen on: 27.6.2025

Plot:
After the assassination of her father (David Castañeda), Eve (Victoria Comte) is taken in by the Ruska Roma led by The Director (Anjelica Huston). She is trained to be both a skilled dancer, and an assassin and bodyguard. Now that Eve is grown up (Ana de Armas), she wants to take revenge on her father’s killers. Despite being cautioned against taking on this particular foe, Eve sets out and soon finds that things are much more complicated than she thought at first.

Despite my misgivings with the later John Wick movies, I was looking forward to Ballerina. I like Ana de Armas, and getting a fresh perspective on the extensive world-building that went into John Wick seemed like a good start. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed by the movie.

As an Austrian, the movie is a bit of a special experience, though not necessarily in a positive way. A good portion of the film takes place in an Austrian village that is shown to be utterly secluded and where strangers are not welcome at all (for reasons). And while I can take this as an acurate comment on small villages in Austria, they just went ahead and chose fucking HALLSTATT for their setting. Hallstatt, the village that is routinely complaining about too many tourists (because, among other things, those tourists simply open up private homes and walk inside). Hallstatt that was literally copied in China. Hallstatt that has about a million visitors a year, about 2,000 tourists per inhabitant. Hallstatt, one of the most visited places in the fucking world. It’s ridiculous and I just can’t move past it.

If it had been the only thing about the film that doesn’t work, I probably could have laughed about it and moved on. But coming at the end of a film that feels completely derivative and illogical, it was just the cherry on top of a mess that started to bore me. It just doesn’t have the same amount of daring to do something new or at least comment on genre conventions that particularly the first Wick film had.

The film has several issues, and one is that they don’t trust Eve enough to carry the film on her own. Which is particularly uncalled for because de Armas does well with both the action and the emotional part of the film (albeit being hampered by a clichéd script). So John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is shoe-horned in in a way that makes one question the timeline of the John Wick films. If they had left it at Wick’s first appearance, it would have been a nice nod, but when he shows up again later, he not only confuses, but also takes away from Eve’s finale.

The action scenes take a while to hit their stride, especially Eve’s first big assignment in a night-club (that didn’t really make plot-sense to me, but fine) suffered from that. There are moments here and there, the supporting cast is generally great (Norman Reedus is tragically underused though) but overall, the film just doesn’t really come together, drawing on so long that I nodded off for a few minutes towards the end.

Summarizing: fucking Hallstatt.