From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025) Review

“From the World of John Wick: Ballerina” Korean Poster

Considering the elegance and beauty of ballet, in the world of cinema being a ballerina can often be a sign of danger. From Jeong Hye-gyeong’s taekwondo infused ballerina routine in 1977’s Secret Agents II, to Jennifer Lawrence’s seductive moves in 2018’s Red Sparrow, tutu’s have never seemed so lethal as when they appear on the big screen. In 2025 Ana De Armas would join their ranks in Ballerina, who after offering up glimpses of her action talents in the likes of 2023’s Ghosted and 2021’s No Time to Die, here gets her own headlining action vehicle. At least, it’s almost her own. A spinoff from the John Wick universe, in the lead up to its release the distributors decided to add the clunky preface From the World of John Wick to its official title, just in case any John Wick fans didn’t notice the presence of Keanu Reevs on the poster. For the purpose of this review though, we’ll stick with Ballerina.

As a spinoff movie Ballerina is particularly unique in that it introduces a completely new main character, compared to the more common spinoff approach of giving a starring role to an existing character who audiences are already familiar with. That’s what we’ll get with Donnie Yen returning for Caine next year after his appearance in John Wick: Chapter 4, and even the streaming series The Continental was told from the perspective of a young version of Ian McShane’s character, Winston, played by Colin Woodell. Here though De Armas doesn’t have the advantage of audience familiarity, and the result is one that allows us to follow a character’s initiation into the Ruska Roma syndicate for the first time, providing another perspective on the internal workings of an organisation of assassins other than John Wick’s.

In the opening scene we witness the assassination of De Armas’s father, also a member of the Ruska Roma, by a rival organisation known as the Cult. Her mother was a member of the Cult and has already been killed, leaving her as an orphan, until she receives an offer to join the Ruska Roma. Spending the next 12 years training in ballet and the art of killing, soon she’s sent on her first mission to protect an heiress known to have attracted some unsavoury attention, with intel suggesting she’ll be targeted at a nightclub. I confess that, being a Korean cinema fan, a large part of my interest in seeing Ballerina was to check out an appearance from Korea’s legendary action director Jung Doo-hong.

The star of City of Violence and Fist and Furious, his appearance here is his first in the 2020’s, and as the assailant looking to kidnap Girls Generation’s Choi Soo-young (clocking in mercifully brief role that does her acting talents no favours) it brings me great pleasure to say it looks like he hasn’t missed a beat. Flanked by a group of taekwon action heavies, the ensuing scene has more aerial flying kicks than you can shake a stick at, and acts as an introduction to the particular set of skills that De Armas has developed. It’s his only scene, which I was fully expecting, but my desire to see one of the most familiar faces from 1990’s – 2000’s Korean action cinema doing his thing in a Hollywood production was satiated.

It’s during one of her missions that De Armas spots the same symbol on the arm of her hit that she saw on those who murdered her father when she was still a child, which sets her off on a mission to avenge her father’s death. Which is really where Ballerina’s problems start, as the story feels half baked at best. The biggest issue is that the decision to find her fathers killers feels almost completely incidental. She’s just started her assassin career and is good at it, so had she never seen the symbol again, there’s never a sense that she was living a particularly tortured life waiting to exact a revenge that’s been years in the making. The result is one that makes the main plot end up feeling like an extended side-mission to her day job, and it’s perhaps because of this that the story becomes increasingly bloated with sub-plots that either confuse or feel unnecessary.

She tracks down a member of the Cult at the Prague branch of the Continental (played by The Walking Dead’s Noman Reedus), who happens to not be such a bad guy after all, and is in fact there protecting a kid. After a shootout leaves Reedus incapacitated he asks De Armas to take care of the kid, a decision that leaves the plot unclear as to what it’s priority is – vengeful daughter seeking to avenge the death of her father, or new assassin on the block left to reluctantly protect the target she’s been left with? Things don’t get any better later on, when we’re hit with a Hallmark TV movie of the day style plot twist involving a surviving member of De Armas’s family, the kind that would make even the worst episode of Days of Our Lives seem like Shakespeare in comparison.

Bloating proceedings even more is the presence of the Baba Yaga himself – Keanu Reeves. The story of Ballerina takes place between the 3^rd and 4^th entries in the John Wick franchise (for obvious reasons), and the incorporation of a scene from John Wick: Chapter 3 seen from De Armas’s perspective is smartly done, providing a subtle and unforced connection to the JW universe. The decision to have De Armas directly interact with Reeves though, not so much, with his character basically reeling off a bunch of monosyllabic John Wick greatest hits that are supposed to resemble a conversation – “Consequences”, “I’m working on it”, “Leave”, “Choices”. Yawn. Remember when John Wick was an actual character? His ridiculous Kevlar blazer also makes an appearance, and the flow of the finale is unnecessarily interrupted in the name of giving Reeves his own minute of action without De Armas around to share the spotlight.

Plot problems aside though, in the hands of director Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard, Underworld) and the 87Eleven Action Team the action is plentiful and, on a technical level, consistently delivers. It’s worth noting that there were reshoots after initial test screenings received a rocky reception, which were primarily overseen by 87Eleven co-founder (and director of all the John Wick’s) Chad Stahelski, whose influence often feels more prominent than Wisemen’s. De Amas gets a dream collection of action talent to go one on one against, as in addition to Doo-hong she gets to go blow for blow with Daniel Bernhardt (much like Keanu Reeves did in the first John Wick), and engage in a flamethrower vs flamethrower finale against Robert Maaser (Humint).

With that being said, the lack of any real emotional stakes in the story means it’s difficult to be invested in much of the action that unfolds. There’s rarely any buildup, with De Amas for the most part simply walking into the next ambush, which leads into the next lengthy action sequence. While the scenes themselves are fun, they often cross the line into gratuitous territory, to a point they no longer felt like they were serving the plot so much as delaying it. If anything most of the action in Ballerina feels like an exercise for the action talent both behind and in front of the camera to do their thing without any restrictions, which unfortunately includes having any meaningful connection to the plot. That may not be a negative for the cinematic action junkie out there, but I would have happily taken half the action scenes in favour of adding some legitimate context to those that are left.

Ultimately Ballerina should please fans of the existing John Wick franchise (and I’d be willing to argue it would please them even if there was no John Wick in it). It contains the same level of creativity in its action scenes, while also taking itself far too seriously (it’s difficult not to roll your eyes at lines like “One bullet, well placed, can change the world”), resulting in a mostly poker faced affair in which we’re regularly witness to grenades forcefully punched into mouths and ice skates lodged in necks. Is De Amas’s Ballerina the next John Wick? The closing scene cliffhanger would like you to think so, but whether audiences will care enough to see more of her world is another question entirely.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5/10