John Wick shows up in Ballerina and he clobbers her. He’s not even hearing it. She tries to fight him the same way she fought everybody else, she’s completely outclassed, and I was sitting there happy about it, because the thing I was afraid of walking in was that he’d be there to make her look good.

There’s a wrestling term for that, putting somebody over. The higher profile wrestler is there to do a job. He loses, or he has a hard time with it, and the crowd walks out going, that’s someone to look at. That’s what I thought John Wick was in this movie for. That didn’t happen. At all. She gets her butt kicked and she just leaves.

This is the spoiler talk, so everything’s on the table. I saw it with Mrs. Know-It-All, we both had a wonderful time, and I spent the drive home trying to figure out why she didn’t like it as much as I did.

She Says Basic, I Say It Was Enough

She’d want me to get this right, so here’s what she actually said. She liked the movie. She had a lot of fun with it. It was just a basic storyline. No depth. She would’ve loved to know more about Eve growing up. We see her as a kid in the beginning, then we see her with bloody toes, and you’re left to assume the rest.

I feel like we’ve seen that story. It’s called La Femme Nikita. French cinema did it first, then we adopted a version of it, and eventually it became a USA television series. So for me, what they gave us was enough to get me into the story and get me where I wanted to go as quickly as possible. Even the backstory is working. You find out her father was part of that other crew, and you find it out in a fight scene, in a flashback.

If anything I felt like we spent one scene too many in her past. I didn’t need anything about the friend who left. That story beat played no part other than to set up the end, when Eve goes to see her friend perform. Real ballerina. They could’ve left it out.

The moment that told me these guys weren’t as worried about story as I might want them to be was her sister. One second she’s there, the next second she’s gone. We barely got a moment. Mrs. Know-It-All kind of expected the two of them to go after the Chancellor together, and it would’ve been cool to see. We didn’t get it.

When you do a movie like this, one of two things has to happen. Either you make it a major offshoot of the main storyline, or it’s got to be what it is. A one-off. Enough to establish a character, establish a series of events and move forward. That’s what this ultimately is for me.

Fight Like a Girl

Ana de Armas did an amazing job, and to me this is how you do a heroine without having her be a Mary Sue. She gets tussled and beat up and knocked down, constantly, and she keeps getting back up. Every time she gets up it’s very Keanu Reeves. You can tell she’s exhausted. She’s like, I can’t. Then she finds the will and she pushes forward.

Her instructor (I can’t remember the character’s name) gives her the pep talk. You’ll always be outweighed. You’ll be outclassed. They’ll be stronger than you, they’ll be bigger than you. So you fight on your terms, you change the rules of the engagement, you cheat if you have to. And it ends with, fight like a girl.

Mrs. Know-It-All had a problem with that line, so I asked her when she stopped being a feminist. Wow, we went that far. Part of it was just that it’s kind of cheesy. But she also has a breast cancer awareness shirt that says fight like a girl, and that’s probably why it didn’t sit right. Her question was, really? How does a girl fight?

I hear her. It didn’t take me out of the story. What the instructor said was 100 percent true, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it really addressed. I know the Critical Drinker will be happy. For me it was the movie saying, we’re not going to let her pretend to be a battering ram, just beating up bigger men. She’s going to have to work for it. She’s going to have to use weapons and guns and whatever else she’s got, and fight dirty. And it’s funny, once she got that permission it was no holds barred.

That speech sets the tone for the whole thing. It’s why the minute Wick shows up and she tries it on him, the movie’s already told you how that goes.

Where This Sits in the Timeline

The first time she meets John Wick places us in time. It’s when he was getting his ticket punched, so we think this gaps into the third movie. As he’s walking out the door she stops him and asks how he got out. He says, I went through the front door. She pushes, and he tells her it’s always her choice, she can leave right now. She doesn’t do it.

Then there’s a brief time jump and she goes on her first mission, protecting some business guy’s daughter. I didn’t realize this before, but the movie really paints who John Wick’s group is, the Russian group. They’re the bodyguards. They can kill, they can be assassins, but the job is to protect. You always protect your charge.

We both thought that entire scene was a test at first. Then she took the claw of a hammer and really started going at the guy, and I was like, oh, it’s got to be real. It’s in a club, because one thing I love about John Wick is that people mind their own business while somebody’s getting their butt kicked, and it’s always loud enough that the gunshots get hidden. This one’s an ice castle.

When she and John finally fight, it’s two months later, which I had no clue about, because these movies don’t tell you distinctly how much time passes. He’s telling her to leave. Just leave. Mrs. Know-It-All caught this: the minute Eve said what happened to her, he stopped saying it. She thinks the revenge thing put a light bulb on for him. It reminded us of the third movie, where Halle Berry’s character says he shot my dog and John’s like, yeah, I get that.

I think she’s right. He looks at his watch, it’s 11:32, and he tells her she has until midnight. If she doesn’t get it done by midnight, he’s got to do his job.

A Cult, Taken Seriously

I feel like Chad Stahelski and his crew were drinking one night, trying to figure out what they were going to do, and they watched Hot Fuzz. The scene where all the villagers have guns and they’re all fighting him. And somebody said, what if we did that for serious? That’s basically what this was. The serious version of that.

Mrs. Know-It-All kept reminding me the other group is a cult, straight up, mostly because she was excited about it. Everybody’s born into it.

Gabriel Byrne has a really cool moment where he explains to Eve what that town is. You can call it a cult, and they are one, but there’s no religious fanaticism in it. These are all former assassins, war fighters, people who wanted to leave and start a family. They’re allowed to do that. Their children have to be trained up. And he’s very explicit: we don’t hide what we are. Unlike the Russian group, who try to play it off, his people are open about what they do.

We always try to write the better story, and hers was Norman Reedus. The premise was to make sure the little girl was safe, and he was trying to pull his daughter out of the cult. What if they’d teamed up? I told her that wouldn’t have told Eve’s story, and she gets that. She just wishes he’d gotten a little more screen time, because his character’s pretty cool.

The Movie I Would’ve Written

My big one is John. When she’s talking to him, I would’ve loved for something she says or does to be the connective tissue to his next movie. Maybe she’s the thing that motivates him not to give up. Mrs. Know-It-All thought the revenge parallel was kind of weak for exactly that reason. He was out for revenge over the dog, she’s out for revenge because the guy killed her family, and that’s as far as it goes.

In the very beginning, before it turns out we’re in a flashback, the writer in me would’ve loved to start at John’s grave site with Ian McShane. Let it be the end of John Wick: Chapter 4, and have her step up next to him. She’s there to visit. He asks where she came from, and she says she was working nearby.

But I kind of dig the way it ends anyway. She has a price on her head, which is just the way these movies go now. The main character has to have a bounty on them. With John Wick: Chapter 5 in pre-production, I think it’d be cool if they crossed paths.

People forget this is the second spin-off. We both loved The Continental. It was a miniseries on Peacock for all of a hot minute, set in the late 60s, early 70s, about how Ian McShane’s character becomes the manager of the Continental and how he met Lance Reddick’s character as a young man. Mel Gibson is the previous manager and he’s off his rocker. I’ve got reviews of it on the channel.

Winston, the Director, and Dueling Flamethrowers

The minute Winston showed up, my breath caught a little in my throat. Golly, he’s good as that character.

Mrs. Know-It-All did not realize the Director was Anjelica Huston. That’s how good the makeup is, and mind you, that’s her in the other John Wick movies too. A real duh moment, her words. Between Huston and McShane they had to de-age them. I don’t know how, but it was probably some of what they’re calling a digital prosthesis, where they put dots on your face and blend it in camera in real time.

Then there are the dueling flamethrowers. It’s such a John Wick thing, and it’s the moment from the trailers everybody’s seen. She gets the fire hose out, bursts through as the guy’s about to light her up, and it’s literally water versus fire. Poor girl gets stabbed so much in this movie that after the two-month jump she’s pulling the tip of a knife out of her arm. She walks through that place, wrecks shop, and as she’s turning to pull out, an SUV slams into her.

We saw it at an AMC with Dolby Atmos. Every time a concussion grenade went off it was a concussion. You felt the rumble and the blowback in your seat. In the flashback it was startling, because I wasn’t expecting it at all. Mrs. Know-It-All’s watch went off to tell her she was in a loud environment.

The soundtrack was amazing, as usual with these movies. I had a playlist going before we left to get into the vibe, and I wore a suit, because this is the closest thing to cosplay I’m going to get. Somebody leaving the theater said, hey man, nice suit.

The Verdict

Ballerina is an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index. I gave it a perfunctory 8 in my non-spoiler review and I hold to that.

Mrs. Know-It-All is at an 8 too. Definitely an 8, she said. If she can watch a movie and have fun, she can forgive a basic storyline, and we love this franchise as it is. She’ll watch it again.

The fight scenes are very creative. They do really neat, realistic things, a lot of them, and Eve is everything she should be next to the bar Keanu set. She gets hurt. She stumbles. She gets stabbed, often.

I said this in my other review and it’s only going to be relevant to comic book fans, but Ana de Armas is like a Jim Lee female character come to life. The square cut of her jaw. She looks like she walked off the pages of a comic book. Mrs. Know-It-All doesn’t read comics, and looking at a picture of her, she totally got it.

If you haven’t watched it yet, please go watch it, and see it in a movie theater. That sound design is unreal.

Mrs. Know-It-All says the story’s basic and I say it was enough to get us where we were going. Tell us which one of us is right, and whether “fight like a girl” landed for you. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.