Movie Review : Ballerina (2025)

I’m not an excessive person, but I’ve always enjoyed excessive things. It’s a subtle distinction. I don’t need twelve jalapeños on my nachos, but I’ll eat a ghost pepper just to find out if my body can handle it. I don’t require thirty-minute doom-metal songs that sound like someone left a jet engine idling in a cave, but I love that they exist. Same goes for tables-ladders-and-chairs wrestling matches, which are basically OSHA violations rebranded as entertainment.

My attraction is simple: I like things that don’t follow rules, and more importantly, don’t feel safe. Which is why the John Wick movies were so fun for the last decade. They were the ultimate "what if" scenario for dog owners everywhere : just how involving can it be to avenge the murder of your pet?

Now, here’s the problem. Expanding the John Wick Universe sounds cool in a press-release kind of way, but it’s also a betrayal of the very thing that made Wick so unreasonably compelling. When everything is excessive all the time, excess stops being excess, it just becomes the furniture. And that’s where Ballerina lands. It has all the moving parts of a John Wick spin-off, except the one that matters: a ridiculous, but relatable grudge.

Without that stupidly human center, all that stylish violence starts to feel like homework.

Ballerina tells the story of Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), a young girl who sees her father (David Castañeda) gunned down by what appear to be neo-Nazis or at least German history cosplayers who really overcommitted to the aesthetic. She’s scooped up by her father’s colleagues, inducted into the Ruska Roma (which now sounds less like a shadowy syndicate and more like a subscription box for murderers), and grows up learning ballet and gunplay in equal measure.

Eventually, she becomes the kind of assassin every kid with a dead parent is contractually obligated to become in movies.

The Problem With Killing Nazis (Again)

Here’s the simplest way to diagnose what’s wrong with Ballerina: "my dad got killed by Nazis" is a far less compelling premise than "the dog my dead wife gave me was murdered by my ex-boss’s idiot son, and now I’m going to kill everyone with a pulse." The Wick saga works because it takes something small, personal and oddly relatable, then inflates it into an operatic bloodbath.

Ballerina takes the opposite route: it leans on Nazis. And here’s the thing, Nazis are historically responsible for six million deaths, which makes them a very real, very uninteresting shorthand for "bad guys." They’ve been killed in every medium from prestige cinema to Wolfenstein video games. You don’t need to justify murdering Nazis. It’s the narrative equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, except the barrel has been sitting in the sun since 1945 with only Zombies coming in as a close second for karma-free murder.

And then there’s the dad problem. Eve’s father wasn’t some innocent bystander caught in the gears of history. He was already playing whatever murky international interloper game the Ruska Roma are running. His death is tragic in a family-tree sense, but narratively? Who cares. He’s not a puppy. He’s not a symbol of hope. He’s a guy with a dangerous job who got the predictable result.

So when Eve grows up and decides her grand act of self-definition is to blow up the very organization that raised her, it doesn’t play like righteous vengeance, it plays like bratty ingratitude. She’s an assassin who should understand how this world works, and yet she goes full scorched earth at the first opportunity, destabilizing the entire geopolitical balance of the underworld (of characters we know and love). It doesn’t feel cathartic at all. It feels like watching someone torch their foster home just to prove they can.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll usually cosign any movie that involves killing Nazis. It’s one of the few bipartisan pleasures left in Occidental culture. But in Ballerina, the Nazis aren’t villains so much as they are a built-in excuse not to bother with interesting (or excessive) stakes. They’re the cinematic equivalent of a "bad guy" cardboard target at the shooting range.

It’s lazy writing, and worse, it squanders the presence of Gabriel Byrne, an actor who deserves to loom over the story like a cursed cathedral, not get wasted as background noise in a morality play everyone’s already seen.

The Problem With The John Wickverse

Which brings up the obvious question: do we actually need a John Wick Universe? The idea sounded clever for about five minutes, until you remember that universes are just what studios build when they don’t know what else to do. The one good expansion we’ve had so far was Nobody in 2021, where Bob Odenkirk reconnects with his true self by rediscovering that his true self is…a murderer! And it worked because Nobody was, wait for it… excessive.

It wasn’t slick or fetishistically choreographed. It was sweaty, awkward, and deeply funny in a way that only middle-aged rage can be. That movie added a layer to the Wick mythology by showing what happens when violence isn’t beautiful anymore, it’s just who you are.

But here’s the part the franchise machine refuses to process: an "extra layer" doesn’t just mean plugging in a female protagonist and calling it diversity. That’s not evolution; that’s tokenism. Wick worked because his motive was hilariously personal. Nobody worked because it was about self-reinvention. Ballerina tries to work by coloring inside the lines of representation, but it forgets to give us the one thing this universe actually requires: a motive so cavalier and personal that it becomes transcendent.

Ballerina half-heartedly admits it doesn’t have much to say by wedging in Keanu Reeves cameos, as if sprinkling Wick on top is enough to give the movie flavor. But the effect is the opposite : every time John shows up, Eve shrinks. She stops being the main character and becomes a side quest in someone else’s game. I mean who cares about this new character when Wick is on screen? Worse, the movie acts like she needs his help to do the one thing cinema has never struggled to do, kill Nazis.

We’ve been watching that on-screen for seventy-five years, in every medium from prestige dramas to Saturday-morning cartoons. It’s the easiest, most well-worn button you can press, and Ballerina still can’t make it feel satisfying.

*

Ballerina is a bad movie disguised as a good one, and that’s the worst kind of bad. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the high school friend who raided the cool kid’s closet and thought wearing the same jacket would transfer the charisma. Sure, it’s got the neon lighting, the sweaty nightclubs, the endless choreography of bullets and blades, but it’s missing the only thing that made John Wick matter: excess.

Wick redefined action movies by taking an unlikely motive and blowing it up to operatic proportions. Ballerina plays by the rules of a franchise that only worked because it broke them. And once excess becomes standardized, you’re not watching rebellion anymore, you’re watching a product.

3.8/10

* Follow me on Instagram and Bluesky to keep up with new posts *