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Ballerina: John Wick’s spin-off does not knock strong enough [critique]
Carried by an Ana of Armas less charismatic than hoped, this derivative of the John Wick universe is one more “John-Wickerie” in a world saturated by the clones of John Wick.
She already has a good ten years on the clock, but the “John-Wick-LOTATION” (the little name we give to the wave of success of John Wick that swarm on the screens) shows no signs of breathlessness. Copies continue to flow and also generate small (Mr Wolff 2 On the video bonus this week, Nobody 2 at the cinema in August…) and, even though the close and flamboyant John Wick: Chapter 4 looked like a burial with great fanfare of the character of the elite assassin drawn from four pins, Keanu Reeves and the prime contractor of the saga Chad Stahelski are indeed working on a fifth opus.
Out of these tumbles Ballerinasecond spin-off of the franchise (after the series The Continental)a film devoted to the character of Eve Maccaro, which we were leaving to enter into the third episode, Parabellum. Eve, played by Ana de Armas (Blade Runner 2049, A knife pulled, Blonde…) And nicknamed the Kikimora (named after a spirit from Slavic folklore) is a super-stupious formed by the terrible criminal organization Ruska Roma, doubled with a hard ballerina to pain, coached by the “director” mafia Angelica Huston, capable of chaining the entrechets until having the dancing slippers of blood …
The film tells of her bruised childhood, then, once she became tall, her revenge crusade against those who massacred her family-crusade who will see her meeting the little world of “John Wick-Verse”, of the irremovable Ian McShane as director of the Continental hotel in New York, with late launches Reddick (in one of her last appearances on the screen)underworld.
Between the story of revenge Passe-Partout and the rehashing of recurring patterns of the saga, Ballerinaproduced by the ghost Len Wiseman (who had not signed a feature film since the remake of Total Recall In 2012), does not try to reinvent anything, but showed a lot of invention, that’s already that, when it comes to boosting yet another fight scene, putting in the hands of Ana de Armas a very varied arsenal, which allows it to fight with ice skates, flame launchers or metal doors used as anti-explosions.
The voluntarily moron humor of the series (the reply “Can I be frank ?“said by a guy named Frank, this genre …) also helps to hold the building, even if we feel that Gabriel Byrne did not completely find the note halfway mid-transam which he was looking for, as a big bad guy who gives their mission orders to his henchmen while depicting wild beasts.
In the wins, it should be noted that Anne Parillaud in person is there, to ensure a kind of passage of symbolic witness between “the Nikita woman” (as they say in the USA) and the Kikimora. But if the film disappoints, it is precisely in terms of the incarnation. We expected a lot of ana de armas in super-assassin breaking from the chain mouths, if only because we had loved it in the shoes of Paloma, side-kick clumsy and castor of James Bond in the best scene of Dying can wait. The actress also provides a fight scenes here, but her character, not helped by her backstory Too banal, seems very dull.
De Armas does not manage to solve the equation that made the success of the character of John Wick – this balance combining melodramatic interiority, mythological grandiloquence and the graphic purity of a BD box. Besides, when Keanu Reeves arrives for a handful of scenes, it is enough for him to pronounce a monosyllabic replica of his cavernous voice so that the magic operates – and that we measure the chasm that separates the Baba Yaga from the Kikimora. But Ana de Armas will undoubtedly have other opportunities to do better. In our world John-Wickisé In the last degree, a Ballerina 2 is a hypothesis that can be difficult to exclude.
From Len Wiseman, with Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane… Duration: 2h05. Release on June 4, 2025
