roughly in the middle

Ballerina (2025) (8/10)

Ballerina is set between John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4, though the story focuses on new character Eve Macarro and her quest for revenge.

We were introduced to the Tarkovsky Theater, one of the Ruska Roma's bases, in John Wick: Chapter 3. There we see what John's childhood was supposedly like and where he probably had his training. What I, personally, found most intriguing about the theater were the ballerinas. Based on what we were shown, all the women in the Ruska Roma were trained in ballet, while all the men were trained in judo. But everyone was also an assassin, and everyone was tatted up and had gnarly injuries from harsh training. A female assassin who relied less on her looks and more on her physicality? Color me intrigued.

And Eve definitely didn't disappoint. Action-wise, I thought this was every bit as good as the main films in the John Wick franchise. It's actually a bit gorier because while John favors guns, Eve seems to have a fondness for grenades. (Let's not get caught up in the physics of whether you can blow someone up in close quarters without also getting blown up. Grenade-fu!)

Not once does Eve use her feminine wiles to get the job done. While that isn't necessarily a bad thing in woman-led spy movies, it's a nice change of pace when a movie deviates from it. There's one scene where Eve's prettied up for a job set at a club (and the camera does focus on her making her badass entrance) but other than that she spends most of her time in pantsuits or generic top + pants combos.

The biggest difference between Eve and John as protagonists is though they're both driven by revenge—his dog (the last gift from/connection with his wife), her father—Eve wants to be in the world of assassins. John spends three movies trying to escape the life he fell back into in the first installment of the franchise, but Eve spends the first half of her movie trying to get in. She wants to become an assassin, become as good as John Wick, so she can find the truth behind her father's death and avenge him.

Eve has (unspoken) misgivings which don't really go away; she hesitates to shoot the Chancellor when they're finally face to face, unlike John who popped Iosef Tarasov in the head with minimal fanfare after terrorizing him for a bit. But Eve chooses to shoot the Chancellor in the end, the same way she chooses to shoot that older assassin as part of her test, the same way she chooses to shoot the goon who was trying to kill her dad.

Eve also exudes much more blatant anger. She growls, snarls, screams during her fights while John only displays that level of emotion in the first movie when he yells, "I'm thinking I'm back!"

Normally I don't like to compare media because I think it's kind of unfair on some level, but with Eve and John I think both approaches are equally interesting and the contrast between them highlights the strong points of each. Unless, I guess, you feel really strongly about one characterization over the other.

Random stuff:

• Hard to pick a favorite fight, but I think I'll go with the flamethrower vs. firehose one. The primal scream Eve let out was 👌🏽 (Not counting this as a spoiler since the scene was in one of the trailers.)
• I will admit that there's something the movie doesn't quite pull off that's in the main films, but I can't quite put my finger on what's missing. Which isn't to say that this is a bad movie—I think it's great—but there's something in the vibes.