From the World of John Wick: Ballerina Review

We first see her in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum gracefully pirouetting on a stage in the background. In this scene, John Wick has come to speak with "The Director" (Anjelica Huston), the stolid head of the Ruska Roma, the powerful crime organization that operates under the cover of a ballet company and from which Wick himself has retired.

What we don't learn then is the identity of the ballerina. Or how, moments later, she likely stepped off the stage, traded her tutu for a jiu-jitsu gi, and threw down a man twice her size in the theatre's back halls, where she trains as an assassin.

In Len Wiseman's John Wick spinoff, first imagined by writer Shay Hatten as early as 2017, the ballerina pirouettes back to centre stage as Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), the dancer-assassin with vengeance in her heart. We meet Eve as she graduates from Ruska Roma into a field agent - by shooting a stranger in a duel of sorts, how else? - and sets off to eliminate her father's killers.

Her first stop is the Continental hotel, whose genial proprietor Winston (Ian McShane) points her in the direction of Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead fame), an assassin from the Cult, the lawless tribe that killed her parents. From the streets of Prague to the snowed-in village of Hallstatt, where the Cult resides, Eve leaves a trail of bodies with gouged eyes and split heads as she exacts revenge.

The idea of a lethal ballerina is a stroke of genius from Hatten. From a commercial point of view, it expands the Wickverse, gives the 60-year-old Keanu Reeves a rest, and brings one of Hollywood's hottest names Ana de Armas into Wick's underworld. It is a move that Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible - the other great action franchise of this century - has been unable to pull off: that is, untether the series from the all-consuming presence of its superstar lead.

Not even the most die-hard fans of Keanu Reeves are missing him when Eve Macarro is drawing guns from her thigh holster and emptying out the bullet-chambers. Early in the training montage, Eve's mentor Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) tells her to "fight like a girl", which Eve supposedly takes to mean "aim for the crotch". She fights dirty. Sometimes she is rigging up a gun-knife, shooting at a guy while stabbing another. Or she is jamming bombs into their mouths, turning them into puree. When John Wick shows up, it is as a fan-service cameo that threatens to confound the plot, but Ana handily holds on to the spotlight.

Eve is put through the wringer in a series of tautly choreographed action scenes that demand Herculean physicality and bones of steel. The standout sequence set in a cozy café, where the homily-dressed patrons reveal themselves to be assassins, is both supremely fun and supremely funny. However, the film misses an opportunity to differentiate Eve's fighting style from John Wick's now-familiar rhythm of gun-knife-hand combat. If you were looking for something more distinctive, say a ballet-inspired fight routine, the closest it comes is in the climactic sequence between Eve and Dex (Robert Maaser), the icy Viking-like assassin, in which flame-throwers and firehoses get spun around in a kind of elemental dance. The scene is part Harry Potter vs Voldemort wand-off, part Dance Of The Dragons.

The mechanics of the plot are a distant third priority after the stunts and the moody cinematography (everything about Hallstatt is jaw-droppingly beautiful). Least convincing is the mythology of the shadowy Cult, led by a Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) whose philosophical musings on free will and fate seem like half-hearted attempts to add character depth. Early in the film, the Cult is built up as a lawless organization of assassins outside the bounds of the High Table, only for them to later be revealed as a highly systematic group with peculiar rituals, not so different from any other assassin collective.

Ballerina ends up colouring inside the lines that John Wick first put down. Even its premise is quite blatantly imitative - an assassin seeking revenge. While Ana de Armas makes a killer killer, Ballerina doesn't expand the world of John Wick so much as instantiate it with a Wickian female counterpart. But when the action is so inimitably epic, when even the gory scenes are gruesome and gorgeous (with people getting shredded like popped water balloons), do fans of John Wick need to ask for anything more?