## 2025-06-26 I knew I’d enjoy **Ballerina**[^1], just not as much as I ended up enjoying it. It's one of those rare instances of a movie that got a bunch of heavy reshoots that actually worked in its favor, as opposed to making it even worse. Set between **John Wick 3** and **John Wick 4**, it’s another tale of revenge, more predictable than the one of the unlikely franchise it's spun from. But it differs in a few interesting ways. The first is that Ana de Armas is ridiculously hot. That doesn’t really matter in the context of the film, I'm just always looking for an opportunity to simp for this woman. As I’ve already stated on my various social handles, Ana de Armas is so hot that even as she was staring at another character getting expositionary dialogue or taunts or whatever thrown at her, and I would lose focus because of how hot she is. So that’s pretty cool. More importantly **Ballerna** sets itself apart from the **Wick** series because our titular character is not the Baba Yaga. She’s barely been an assassin for the past two months. This completely recontexualizes the film’s fight scenes. Eve can’t walk into a room and no-diff everyone in it. She has to be scrappy, inventive. Her fights involve a lot of improvisation, and frankly, they got pretty tense! When John Wick is in a fight, the question isn’t whether he’ll get through it or not, it’s “how is he gonna kill people this time?” But despite the fact that it’s obvious they wouldn’t kill off Ana de Armas when they could make another bajillion dollars off of these movies, I did wonder how she’d survive her fights at times. It turns out the answer is: with lots of grenades. *Because* Eve is so different from Wick, the fights in **Ballerna** end up feeling fresh and original, which is kind of a wild feat five movies into this franchise.[^2] There were a few times where I marked out, which is pretty much what I always want from these movies. The set-pieces are all as cool as you’d expect, but a spoilery one in particular was surprising to me. It plays with what’s become the formula for the **Wick** series in a creative way, and was probably my favorite part of the movie. **Ballerina** was great. I’ll keep watching these as long as the team wants to keep making them — or when they start getting worse, lmao. [^1]: I’m not using the stupid full name [^2]: And one TV show that we don’t talk about