Fans of the John Wick series approach each new film expecting that "extreme violence will be dispensed and kill shots administered with abandon", said Helen O'Hara in Time Out. And on that level, this action-packed spin-off from the franchise does not disappoint.
Set between "John Wick: Chapter 3" and "John Wick: Chapter 4", "Ballerina" stars Ana de Armas as Eve, a young woman who, as a girl, witnessed the assassination of her killer father, and was taken under the wing of Winston (Ian McShane), a hotel owner and Wick-verse regular.
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A 'short but welcome' cameo
Initially, the trainee assassin does as the director tells her, said Adam Nayman in Sight and Sound. We see a lot of her "bumping off various mobsters en masse and earning her stripes in the form of tattoos".
But when one of her "many (many) vanquished henchmen" turns out to have connections to her father's killer (Gabriel Byrne), she goes rogue and sets out on her own quest for vengeance. There's a "short but welcome" cameo from Keanu Reeves as Wick, but Huston chews through her dialogue "like a bored kid playing with her food".
'Lowest-common-denominator sadism'
Nor can de Armas do much with her "lethally dull" role, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. Eve has a "spirit-sapping portentousness" that drains any fun from the film.
The action scenes, meanwhile, boil down to "lowest-common-denominator sadism". The previous John Wick films have been entertaining enough, but "Ballerina" is "an exercise in flailing tedium that shows all the signs of a total creative power cut".