Ballerina dances with John Wick

All the John Wick movies provide me with a conundrum. I enjoy watching glamorous locations. My heart pitter patters at handsome men like Keanu Reeves. I envy the athletic skills of martial artists. I revel in glowing colors of beautiful lighting from neon and nature. I go all gushy for dogs. The John Wick franchise gives me all these elements—surrounded in a cacophony of gratuitous, unsettling violence created by its underworld hired killers. With less emphasis on dogs and more on a beautiful woman rather than handsome man, Ballerina dances in the John Wick underworld of assassins without all the killer moves needed to leap into a fresh, startling place—but then why would it? As a spinoff seeking to become a franchise, Ballerina continues the display of frenetic martial arts and extensive killing that includes another Wickworld trait, one that finds surprising tools to use as weapons, in this case dinner plates and ice skates. More than creative killing, Ballerina with its choice of female star in an action role, highlighting the idea with the song “Fight Like a Girl”—though aside from more than usual kicks aimed at men’s groins, the Ballerina character fires guns and flamethrowers with no gender specific trait. Few women or men could actually survive all the blows and hits, but believability never factored big in the series. Stylish looks count, and star Ana de Armas suits the role, expanding on the grace and power she showed as a rare bright spot joining James Bond as a spy named Paloma

in No Time to Die. De Armas’s newest action outing would benefit from Paloma’s lighter sense of humor but makes a serviceable entry into a killer world.