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Film Review — Ballerina
A well-cast Ama De Armas is out for violent revenge in this predictable but action-packed John Wick spin-off
Since Ana De Armas’s character was the only bit of the wretchedly misjudged No Time to Die (2021) that I liked, it’s great to see her back in action movie mode in Ballerina. This time, she plays a revenge-seeking assassin in a “sidequal” to John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (2019), set in that same ridiculous parallel universe where murderous criminals have their own Diagon Alley-style hotels and gun shops around the world, and the police never bother to investigate their crimes or show up when they’re shooting one another to smithereens. The hugely memorable finale of John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) is a particularly ludicrous case in point. Where are the police? Seriously.
Given the ferocity of the bone-crunching fight sequences, it is particularly laughable that barely a bruise is sustained by Armas’s character, Eve Macarro, as she cuts a bloody swathe through endless operatives of “the Cult”. This is the extra-evil (by John Wick standards) community of vicious nutjobs who murdered her father. How are they extra-evil? Because they live in Hallstatt and don’t care for outsiders. No, really. We don’t find out anything more about the Cult other than that they don’t let anyone leave, and the rest of the…
