Ballerina and cuckoldry.

Comparisons abound: Ballerina isn't worthy of the John Wick mantle, but it's still a pretty decent action movie. Yet another great grenade movie this year.

Before we talk about Ballerina, let’s talk about cuckoldry. It’s the first thing that came to mind as soon as John Wick enters the screen, some 40 minutes in. The Baba Yaga. The Boogeyman. The mythologised God of this universe, if you will. He arrives, upends the narrative through the sheer power of four movies of worship, and then leaves, the movie now feeling as though there’s a hole which wasn’t there five minutes before. Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) now needs to prove herself worthy to hold the mantle in a movie that shows what else we could possibly be watching, and its to the detriment of Ballerina that it can’t warrant the change. No matter how much backstory Len Wiseman and co. fit into this bloated 2-hour neon extravaganza, it’s always going to be ‘From the world of John Wick’, and we’re all just waiting for him to come around the corner.

That’s the primary problem with the movie: Eve Macarro. Early on, in one long, gorgeously choreographed (obviously with Stahelski involved) set-piece, Eve watches her father die in front of her eyes by a strange gang with X scars on their bodies. Unsure of where to go or what to do, she joins the Ruska Roma, another troupe of assassins, slowly learning the art of murder. Once she becomes skilled enough and passes all of their examinations, she becomes a fully fledged member of the troupe, the Kikimora, and vows to hunt down the people who killed her father. Unlike the other John Wick movies, this protagonist is properly characterised, attempted to give a genuine narrative arc, and built up emotionally – all of which never works.

It’s all too lore heavy and expository, too much about the different troupes and rules and choices, and enough faux patriarch diatribe stuff to remind an audience of 2014 Tumblr. In an opening training montage for the Ruska Roma Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), Eve’s mentor, tells her to ‘fight like a girl’, and in the very next scene she kicks a guy in the balls. It is the worst version of what this movie could’ve been, using the fact that Eve is a woman to underpower her, and to provide the heaviest contrast to the Wick we know to differentiate the two. Too often is she thrown around like a ragdoll, beaten up, put to the floor – optically, of course, it’s not a great look, but beyond that her weaknesses don’t manifest in her own fighting style. The movie never actually makes her ‘fight like a girl’, whatever that means. Her character remains a one note functional face to push the action through, and while Ana de Armas does her best with the thin material, there’s only so much she can do.

In fact, other side characters seem to have more going on than she does. Look to Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus), a member of the supposed gang of nutjobs (though this is never actually shown), who has tried to take his daughter away from the lifestyle, rebelling his father and breaking free. Obviously, the mirror to Eve is there on the surface, as she was almost kidnapped by them as a child too, but Reedus plays it with an outward bravado and sense of urgency that’s seemingly missing from Eve. As he says, she’s in over her head about everything, and we’re wanting to see what’s going on above as well.

While the movie doesn’t exactly make the most use out of the supposed change in fighting style, and often resorts to typical Wickian gunslinging, there are some set pieces that blow the doors off the hinges. Specifically, one in which Eve runs out of bullets and has to use grenades, chucking them, using the recoil to get out of the way of bullets, and in one masterstroke by the movie, flipping over a table and using the momentum to pull the pin for one massive explosion. You can tell watching it that the crew were giggling imagining the insanity on display. Another moment near the end with the promised flamethrower from the trailer looks like something more out of Harry Potter than a John Wick movie, as fire and water shoot at each other like beams out of a wand. Maybe the most disappointing part of this whole endeavour is that there is genuine care put into the action: it’s kinetic in all the best ways, silly and stylish. If it wasn’t for Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, it’d be a shoe in for the stunts Oscar.

Despite the narrative woes Ballerina remains certifiably electric because of the creativity of its action set pieces. Its ambition is admirable, if only they were willing to ditch the initial hook and create a more insular experience, we might really have something special on our hands. As it is now, and what looks like will be the future for the spin-off movies, we’re just all sat in the cuck chair, waiting for Keanu Reeves to show up and save the day. The John Wicky way.