Ballerina: Nah, Let's Just Call It John Wick 5

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

You shouldn’t have to learn stuff like this the hard way, but the makers of the John Wick franchise did so when they spun off the 2023 streamed assassin series prequel The Continental: From the World of John Wick.

The lesson: Without Keanu Reeves, the World of John Wick is just, well, a world. A miniseries with younger actors playing both new and familiar characters didn’t cut it with Wick fans. They never warmed up to this Keanu-free enterprise (which probably also didn’t meet their expectations violence-wise)

Lesson learned. Ballerina – which introduces Ana de Armas as Eve Macarro, a killing machine with a mean pirouette – is also marketed as “from the world of John Wick.”

Ana de Armas and Keanu Reeves as Eve and John Wick in Ballerina

However, guess what? Despite the punctuation put on things in John Wick: Chapter 4, Reeves is front and slightly left-of-centre as John Wick in Ballerina. This is not a spoiler. The studio features him heavily in both ads and trailers.

The narrative escape-route is that Ballerina is set during the events of earlier John Wick movies. It turns out that, while noisily negotiating his switch from hunter to hunted, the world’s most dangerous assassin still had time to attend to the commands of his erstwhile Ruska Roma mentor, The Director (Anjelica Huston).

Reeves’ and Huston’s characters, are joined here by other familiar actors/characters, including Winston Scott (Ian McShane), the owner of The Continental, the four-star hotel that serves the world’s duly certified assassins, and the late Lance Reddick as The Continental’s concierge Charon (anticipatory scenes he is said to have shot during the filming of Chapter 4). New to the series is The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus, who the press-kit refers to as “mysterious man” Daniel Pine, so I’ll leave it at that, except to say he’s a good fit.

In short, Ballerina is as close to a John Wick 5 as you are going to get without calling it that.

Missing in action, literally, (but staying on as producer) is stunt master Chad Stahelski, who directed the first four movies and whose connection with Reeves back to The Matrix made their relationship almost telepathic.

Replacing him is Len Wiseman, who earned his kill stripes with the Underworld franchise. You’d have to be pretty deep into stylistic film violence to discern the difference between the two directors’ approach. For the early John Wick movies, the producers included kill-counts in the press kit. They no longer do that, but my sense is that there are more kills in Ballerina than the first film, but nowhere near the latter sequels.

Eve’s story, like John Wick’s, is one of revenge. As a child, her father was a victim of the hired assassins of The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). Saved (and later certified with an assassin’s marker) by Winston, she is delivered to The Director’s care, to be trained as both a world-class dancer and killer. Eve, however, never loses sight of her ultimate goal (did I mention it’s revenge?), which puts her at odds with The Director, who doesn’t welcome war with another Family.

Hence, the insertion of Wick into the story, with the simple job of stopping Eve. You know, talking it out, cooling things down, yoga, stuff like that. (Kidding).

By now, relentless killing is practically a learned film science. What appears to matter is who’s doing it. Fueled by familiar faces, and de Armas’s commitment to her role, Ballerina is, at least, a little extra Wick for fans who thought they’d seen the last of him.

Ballerina. Directed by Len Wiseman. Starring Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves and Anjelica Huston. In theatres June 6.