‘Ballerina’ pirouettes through familiar ‘John Wick’ beats

A franchise needs to reach a healthy stage of maturity before it can begin to produce spin-offs from the main feed.

It took “Star Wars” seven episodes before it sidestepped with “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” It took until the ninth installment of the “Fast & Furious” series to get the buddy adventures of Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw in “Hobbs & Shaw.”

Besting both behemoth franchises is the “John Wick” series, which has produced its first spin-off (we’re not going to count the short-lived Peacock series, “The Continental”), “Ballerina,” after only four mainline entries.

Franchise creator Derek Kolstad, director Chad Stahelski, and star Keanu Reeves are nowhere to be found here except during the end credits as part of the long list of producers. It’s a testament to the world they’ve created that their physical absence doesn’t fully knock over this tower of cards. It is perpetually teetering, as the trio has set such a high bar over the past decade that no newcomer could and should be expected to flawlessly meet or exceed it.

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Director Len Wiseman, finally given permission to grace the silver screen after a decade-long banishment to low-tier television after the calamity that was 2012’s “Total Recall” reboot, does just that, giving us more of the same through slightly inferior methods.

The production qualities are all still top-tier, with the sets and atmosphere beckoning us to dig deeper into their history and importance. But while we, the audience, see it all as decorative eye candy, the characters experience it as just lipstick on a pig being sent to the slaughterhouse.

Violent actions breed violent consequences, which is what John Wick has had to reckon with since those goons decided to kill his puppy back in the first film.

Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) had that choice forced upon her at a young age when her father was murdered by The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne) right in front of her. The Ruska Roma organization took her in and gave her the skills to transform from a victim to a victor. Vengeance lingered in her mind for all those years, acting as the fuel for her rageful fire.

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Through the inanimate nature of a bullet and the two sides of a coin, the analogy of choice is presented to Eve while she’s working through her origin story. Revenge won’t bring her father back, and it will very likely lead her down a darker path of self-destruction.

Returning from the previous two “John Wick” entries, writer Shay Hatten tries to use this conflict to instill tension over where Eve will fall on the spectrum of good and evil. The nuance becomes almost entirely lost when an abducted child becomes involved, and Eve must protect her from The Chancellor. No studio would allow their tentpole blockbuster to contain a scene of the hero being apathetic toward the mistreatment of a kid, so we know Eve will do the right thing and keep her safe. I’m not a sadistic freak, but just once I’d like a film to fully subvert this tiring trope.

Apart from that stumble, the other concepts relating to the action are decent. Eve is physically weaker than her opponents, which means she has to be more resourceful when it comes to establishing an advantage. The combination of hand grenades thrown like snowballs and a military-grade flamethrower makes for some exciting set pieces.

There’s also the usual hand-to-hand and gunplay, which de Armas handles well. Her acting may not be up to par, a common problem for any actor who tries to tackle the stilted dialogue they’re given in this franchise. But she has the raw physicality and star presence to carry the lengthy fight sequences. Going back on what I said earlier, Reeves does appear as Wick in a cameo that likely acts as a teaser for a team-up movie down the line.

I wouldn’t mind seeing de Armas and Reeves work together again in this series, as long as Stahelski is back at the helm. Each of the successive entries in the “John Wick” series has successfully improved upon the previous one, both in terms of scope and scale.

“Ballerina” is the first to take a step back, a minor one nonetheless. But there are still certain aspects that are promising, so I’ll treat this like one of the lesser entries in the MCU that are meant to be connective tissue for the large-scale Avengers films.

Lionsgate will release “Ballerina” in theaters nationwide on June 6.

Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and everything in between. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.