Being John Wickovich: There's More Russia in "Ballerina" than in the entire series

Wide release from June 5th: "Ballerina" in Russia was released not as a pre-show service, but quite traditionally. And although this is a Hollywood blockbuster, which some critics have already called the main action movie of the summer of 2025, it seems to be made about Russia and for Russia. In addition to Baba Yaga, also known as John Wick, there are kikimores, a Tarkovsky retrospective (the title of the film "Andrei Rublev" is distorted), Tchaikovsky's music and many other elements of Russian culture. Perhaps you can even consider the picture an ethno-action, although there is an American metropolis, an Alpine village, and the seedy places of Prague. But ballet is not enough. Izvestia watched the film and shares their impressions.

Comic action movie

The events of "Ballerina" unfold between the third and fourth installments of the John Wick saga, but the film is made in such a way as to be understandable to any audience. Including the one who had only ever heard of John Wick. Although, of course, if the Russian title was something like "John Wick: Ballerina", it would better match the movie.

The John Wick universe is a world secretly ruled by large criminal clans. Everyone has their own strict code of honor, but the adherents are so cool that no police order them. Their only worthy rivals are the super fighters from other clans. And the most legendary of all is the aging John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves. He will appear in "Ballerina," but the main character here is not him, but a certain Eva.

We don't know much about Eve. In the prologue, her father, an assassin, is himself killed by mysterious people. Eva manages to escape, and one of the criminal clans gives her shelter. "You're going to be a kikimora now," they tell her there, and the Russian audience falls to the floor laughing. It should be said here that "Ballerina" is not so much a comedy as a comic action movie, which you laugh at where, it seems, it is not particularly planned by the authors. So, Eva had a favorite toy as a child, a music box with a ballerina. "Tchaikovsky..." one of Eva's interlocutors says thoughtfully. And the audience laughs again, it sounds so ridiculous and banal, and the character clearly has nothing more to say. Just as the theater with Tarkovsky's name on the facade has become one of the important locations, but even here the authors lack either erudition or the desire to somehow continue this line, to develop the image. At the same time, it says on the facade: "Tarkovsky series Andrey Rublev Trinity", which is even unclear how to translate. Either they have a Tarkovsky series called "Andrei Rublev Trinity" there, or they were too lazy to check Wikipedia for the name of the film.

So, kikimora. Special agents with this call sign have the task of being a guardian angel. At all costs, it is necessary to protect the chosen person, brutally dealing with enemies. Eva has been honing this skill for years, working as a ballet dancer in the theater as a cover. However, it should be said that the ballerina is just a lousy one, and the scenes where Ana de Armas, the performer of the main role, tries to perform the simplest turn, cause new bouts of laughter among the Russian audience. It is unclear how, after so many years of training, the girl did not master the basics of the profession so well, even though she learned to kill quite decently. Almost like the Belarusian John Wick (yes, this character talked about his roots in one of the previous films in the series).

The fights where ballerina Eva destroys hordes of enemies in such a way that each opponent has enough screen time and no one is offended look comical. Therefore, she is in no hurry to use firearms, preferring improvised items. And the opponents behave like gentlemen, patiently waiting for their turn, not attacking right away. There is a choice, shoot or fight with your fists, more often choose the latter. Since they don't like hitting women, they most often try to throw Eve against a table or a wall, or at least on the floor.

Maybe that's why the film is called "Ballerina": everything here is conditional, like in ballet, and there is no need to wait not only for realism, but even for plausibility. And Eve herself is conditional. All we know about her inner world is that she likes to avenge her abused childhood, but outwardly she is also a mystery to us. We see her tattoos, but at least once we should be shown her scars, because Eva is always unlucky. Either a piece of glass will stick into her shoulder, or she will be stabbed with a knife, but she doesn't even pay attention. It's nothing, it's a mundane matter, it's important to destroy the enemy by doing it beautifully so that it feels good. Just like John Wick bequeathed, whom Eva tries to look up to and catch up to as much as possible.

Who plays in "Ballerina"

Lots of fun encounters in the movie. The director of the Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky Theater and, concurrently, the head of the Russka Roma clan, is played by Anjelica Huston, who here returns to her most famous image, Morticia Addams from the legendary dilogy. She even says something like that, just a little more clumsily. The dialogues in the film are generally wonderful: the characters seem to have armed themselves with quotation books bought in cheap bookstores, and communicate mostly with aphorisms. However, they are such that you don't really want to memorize and quote them. Something like the fact that one bullet is quite enough for complete happiness, so many things can be done with this bullet, and it can protect, or it can kill. The meaning is something like this, and soon you will see many sayings from the film in the form of memes on the forums, they deserve it.

Gabriel Byrne is spectacularly sad in the frame, and it is clear that the artist remembers how he starred with Jim Jarmusch in "Dead Man" in the 90s, played with the Coen brothers in "Miller's Crossroads". And before that, he was invited by Costa-Gavras and Michael Mann. But now Byrne is no longer the same, he has to be a psychotic supervillain who cannot cope with a single loser ballerina.

Ian McShane really wants to say something clever, this is not the first time his character has appeared in the John Wick series. He is beautifully dressed here, he has a wonderful neckerchief, his interiors are rich and in some ways he is even intelligent. When McShane was being filmed by Woody Allen and Franco Zeffirelli, the dialogue was in perfect order. And now what? It's his character who pronounces Tchaikovsky's last name and stammers, trying not to look too ridiculous after such an epic.

There's also Norman Reedus, the superstar of "The Walking Dead" and the video game Death Stranding. He doesn't have much to play here, but he still managed to get a few bright screen minutes. True, I had no luck with the dialogues either, but on the other hand, it's still an action game. Maybe you don't have to wait for something special.

Why is she a girl?

Over the past ten years, cinema has clearly developed a demand for action heroines with inner drama, who are not devoid of charisma and the ability to effectively and effectively kill. Whether it's "Assassin for Hire" with Nathalie Emmanuel or "Furiosa" with Anna Taylor-Joy, the essence doesn't change. But Keanu Reeves, one of the producers, did not want to see another "Wonder Woman 1984" (2020) or "Explosive Blonde" (2017) in "Ballerina", and therefore, as they say, the director was instructed to move away from the gloomy and serious tone of the action films about Wick, diluting it with a lot of jokes and gags.. Let's allow ourselves a small spoiler to illustrate the humor in the film once again. At some point, we find ourselves in a theater where "Swan Lake" is on stage. Did the matrimonious killer really get smart and learn to dance, we think? And we start looking for her among the ballerinas. But Eve is in the audience. She's not good at dancing, what are you going to do. In previous films about Wick, by the way, Eva was played by another actress, the professional dancer Unity Phelan, who looks much more like a ballerina than de Armas. Okay, if you want to go to ballet, go to the Black Swan, Portman really tried and worked hard there, even if she didn't grab the stars from the sky.

But the public loves Anna de Armas, for a reason, a few years ago, the actress was chosen as a Bond girl. And in the image of Eve, she was accepted long before the film was released. For example, recently her character was added to the popular action movie Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

The film was released in Russia a day before the premiere in the United States, and in the coming weeks it is destined to become the leader of the box office, that's clear. And as a post-script note, we will note a small but very elegant homage, which not all fans of the film will appreciate. In one scene, a combat choreography is mounted with a shot from a comedy with Buster Keaton, and thus a funny parallel is drawn. Like Keaton, the characters in the film do not smile, and the objects around them immediately begin to dance chaotically, creating paradoxical situations. You can forgive movies a lot for such things, although it would be better to show Keaton's short films right before the Ballerina sessions. It would be both funny and stylish. Maybe someone else will think of it.