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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