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Review: ‘Ballerina’ Faintly Echoes The Greatness of John Wick
‘Ballerina’ has moments of excitement and quality, but one can’t shake the feeling that we’ve seen all of this before…
Ballerina was a production plagued by major problems behind the scenes. The second spin-off from the wildly (and rather unexpectedly) successful John Wick franchise (following The Continental miniseries, which received lukewarm praise but soon faded from cultural memory) was initially slated for a release on the 7th of June 2024, but a panicked Lionsgate decided instead to put the film through dramatic re-shoots after its initial cut was deemed too poor for wide release. The John Wick films have been lucrative for Lionsgate, and so allowing its first cinematic spin-off to flop was the last thing that the studio wanted, especially following a troublesome 2024 with Borderlands, Megalopolis, The Crow and more struggling to re-coup their costs. After some of the original version of Ballerina was scrapped completely, Chad Stahelski — the stuntman turned director who helmed all four John Wick films to great success — returned to take over the production while the film’s credited director, Len Wiseman (behind pure mediocrity such as Underworld, the Total Recall remake and Live Free or Die Hard… need we say more about his talent as a director), was…
