Ballerina (2025)

When “No Time to Die” (2021) came out, Agent Paloma (Ana de Armas) had a bit role as a CIA operative working alongside James Bond to stop Safin’s plans for world destruction.
Paloma wasn’t a Bond girl – she was a fully capable agent who fought alongside Bond and kicked just as much ass.
When her time on screen was done, I wondered if Paloma would be a recurring character as de Armas was clearly capable and comfortable in the role of pugilist and gun-fighter, potentially to take the mantle of 007.
Clearly that didn’t come to pass, especially since Amazon bought 007 and I doubt they’re going to mess with the Bond formula too much.

However: someone at LionsGate clearly had the same thought I did, because four years later we got Ana de Armas in a different hyper-violent franchise: “Ballerina” (2025).

***

My favorite part of the John Wick universe is that nothing matters, some humans are impervious to death, and anyone you meet at any time is probably an assassin.

The main-line Wick movies (2014-2023) follow the titular John Wick (Keanu Reeves) and his gun-kata murder sprees in response to someone killing his puppy; if someone could be killed via bullets or blunt-force trauma, John could and would do it.

Meanwhile, Eve Maccaro (Ana de Arma) decided that her preferred method for dispatching anyone was grenades and throwing sharp objects. It was pleasantly novel after four movies of watching Wick shoot people, but after the first hour of this one, the “throw thing, people die” modus operandi ended up feeling a lot less… fun.

Like John, Eve was a member of the RuskaRoma murder/theater “family,” an organization that has a confusing-at-best business model of high-end theater, contract killing, and Russian Orthodox church, internal to the world of everyone-is-an-assassin that the other movies have already established.
Also like John, Eve’s motivations were driven entirely by a need for revenge after a competing murder-family murdered part of her family.

And if you’ve seen the other movies in this series, you know exactly what kind of killing spree this movie has in store, so I’m not going to waste anyone’s time elaborating on the noticeable population decreases in any given area that Eve passed through.

As a protagonist, I feel like they didn’t know what to do with Eve. It was clearly established that she was with the RuskaRoma family from an early age, and thus presumably spent her 12 years with them learning how to be a murder-ballerina, but when the body of the movie started and Eve was approximately 20, she was still very much learning all of the stuff instead of refining it. After yet another montage of failed training, mentor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) said approximately “you’re a woman, you’ll always be smaller and weaker, so you need to change the terms of the fight. Cheat, if you have to.”
Pretty good advice, given the types of fights we’ve seen John in over the last decade.
Then another training montage showed Eve kicking her sparring buddy in the balls and… that was it. At no other point during the rest of the movie did it feel like Eve was finding alternate ways to win her fights – no booby traps, no honey-pots, no sniper shots on unsuspecting marks. She just kept solving her problems with close-combat murder like John did.

This movie took place somewhere around “John Wick: Chapter 2” (2017), including scenes directly snipped from that movie, and a few recreated shots from other angles so that Eve and Wick could interact. We also got scenes at The Continental hotel in Manhattan and a new one in Prague, including repeat instances of Winston (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick).

I’m always pleased to see Winston on screen, as his character exudes classiness.

I was far less pleased to see Charon on screen, since Reddick has been dead since 2023. Thus I’m not sure if the scenes we saw of him were picked off the cutting room floor of previous movies (fine), filmed before his death (also fine), or if his face was AI’d onto someone else’s body (definitely not fine), nor was there an “in memorium” tag line at the end of the movie.

The movie was scored almost entirely by various renditions of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” Technically there were other songs if you look up the soundtrack, but the only thing I recognized and remember is “Swan Lake.”

Like with the other movies, the action was almost entirely close-combat/close-quarters. Frustratingly, there were a handful of scenes where the CGI was distressingly obvious, which is super weird because the series is known for its practical effects and carefully choreographed fights.

The addition of de Armas as a spin-off character makes me wonder if this is LionsGate hedging their bets against Reeves getting too old to do his extreme stunts any more – the dude is 60, and at some point he’s not going to be able to do such intense action sequences and the studio is going to want to keep this cash-cow alive.

It wasn’t a bad movie by any means; I’m not upset that I paid to see it in theaters, but I also felt like it was overall a step-down in quality from the main-line flicks, so I hope this isn’t a bellwether of the franchise.

While I liked watching it in theaters, I can’t really recommend you do the same.
But it did earn 3 Claws, so it’s worth watching from the comfort of your couch.