Ballerina (5 Stars)

This is a film that's grown on me. I gave it five stars from its first viewing, but I've always added "it's not as good as the John Wick films". Now I'm not so sure. "Ballerina" is different to the John Wick films, but it's just as good, in its own way. John Wick himself was always a master assassin, from the first film onwards, but Eve Macarro is a new recruit to the Ruska Roma, who needs to be trained from the ground up. She's like "Nikita", or more like "Red Sparrow". 

"Ballerina" doesn’t so much expand the John Wick mythology as refract it; a side-step rather than a leap forward, yet one that reveals new textures within a world that had, by "John Wick Chapter 4", begun to feel almost sealed.

Set against the familiar framework established in John Wick and elaborated through "John Wick Chapter 2" and "John Wick Chapter 3", the film’s most immediate contribution is perspective. Where those entries centred on John Wick as both participant and anomaly, Ballerina shifts the focus to an initiate; someone shaped by the system from the outset rather than dragged back into it. This alone alters the tone. The mythology is no longer something glimpsed from the outside or resisted from within; it becomes an environment, almost a culture, that produces its own agents.

The Ruska Roma, previously a striking but secondary presence, moves into the foreground. What had once seemed like a stylistic flourish, ballerinas trained alongside assassins, now reads as a fully realised institution with its own internal logic. The film leans into the idea that artistry and violence are not merely juxtaposed, but intertwined. Discipline, repetition and performance become the connective tissue between dance and killing, suggesting that the mythology’s rituals are not confined to coins and markers, but embedded in the very bodies of its practitioners.

This emphasis on training and transformation adds a layer that the earlier films only hinted at. In the mainline series, assassins simply are; their skills are presented as faits accomplis. Ballerina asks how such figures are made. The answer is not comforting. The mythology expands to include systems of control that feel less like honour codes and more like indoctrination. The world of assassins, once alluring in its elegance, acquires a harder edge; its beauty is revealed as something constructed through coercion.

At the same time, the film subtly recalibrates the role of institutions like the The Continental. In the earlier films, the Continental functioned as a neutral sanctuary, a space where rules imposed order on chaos. Here, its neutrality feels more ambiguous. Seen from the perspective of someone raised within the system, it is less a refuge than a checkpoint; one node in a network that monitors, regulates and ultimately constrains. The mythology becomes less romantic, more systemic.

Crucially, "Ballerina" resists the temptation to over-escalate. After the globe-spanning, rule-bending climax of "John Wick Chapter 4", it would have been easy to introduce an even higher authority or a deeper layer of conspiracy. Instead, the film narrows its focus. The High Table remains distant, almost irrelevant; what matters are the local structures, the immediate relationships and the personal costs of participation. This contraction paradoxically enriches the mythology. By showing how the system operates on the ground, it makes the larger hierarchy feel more credible.

There is, however, a tension at the heart of this approach. By explaining how assassins are trained, by detailing the mechanisms that produce them, the film inevitably demystifies aspects of the world that were once left to the imagination. The danger, as in "John Wick Chapter 3", is that myth hardens into procedure. The more we see, the less we wonder.

Yet "Ballerina" mitigates this by shifting the emotional centre. The mythology is no longer primarily about rules; it is about identity. What does it mean to belong to this world if you never had a choice? Can its codes be internalised without being questioned? In this sense, the film doesn’t just add lore; it interrogates the cost of that lore on those who live inside it.

In the end, "Ballerina" functions as a kind of echo within the larger saga. It doesn’t reshape the mythology in the way the sequels did, nor does it attempt to conclude it. Instead, it deepens it laterally, filling in the spaces between what we already know. The result is a world that feels less like a series of elegant rules and more like a lived-in system; one that creates its own adherents, and perhaps its own victims.

It’s a quieter form of expansion, but a meaningful one. If the John Wick films built a myth, Ballerina shows how that myth is sustained; not by legends like John Wick, but by the countless figures shaped in its image.

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