Attention all action film fans! Run, don’t walk, to the nearest movie theater to see From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Then set aside some time a day or two later to go see it again. This is one for the ages.

Ana de Armas, who’s been a star waiting for the right vehicle ever since Knives Out brought her to widespread attention in 2019, has now got a film franchise worthy of her. The fascination of Ballerina is established early on — how can a small, slight, delicate-looking young woman such as de Armas’s character, Eve Macarro, trained in ballet, become an unbeatable killing machine à la John Wick, so she can avenge her murdered parents?

Though it should be noted that ballet is an insanely athletic discipline that inures practitioners to pain. Ballerina demonstrates this in a scene of bleeding toes in red-soaked toe shoes that ends with the implacable Director (Anjelica Huston) telling Eve, “Go tend to your wounds before you get sepsis and we have to cut off your feet.”

So Eve’s got a high tolerance for pain going for her. But she keeps losing in hand-to-hand combat exercises against men. Finally, the Director, who runs a ballet academy that also trains assassins for the deadly Ruska Roma crime family, tells her she’ll never be bigger or stronger than her opponents. So how to survive and win?

“Fight like a girl.”

Here, that line means: figure out how to use your own apparent weaknesses to your advantage, so that size and strength no longer determine the winner. Flexibility, adaptability, the element of surprise, the willingness to “cheat” — all of this soon has Eve winning every battle. And there’s an unspoken element that’s the best of all — the emotionality that’s supposed to be a weakness of women is turned into a vicious fury. Once Eve wins her first bout, and the defeated man is lying on the ground, she kicks him sadistically in the groin, a completely gratuitous yet thrilling expulsion of rage.

Anger continues to be her fuel, expressed in a range of expressions, from merely irked when she’s fighting armed male opponents who beset her when she’s on her way to do something more important, to the snarling fury she brings to her final life-or-death fights. She leaps onto the back of a huge man to simultaneously strangle him and gouge out his eyes with a maenad’s passion and avidity.

The cumbersome phrase From the World of John Wick that frontloads the film’s title, probably so that macho types can buy a ticket without having to say, “One for Ballerina,” is nevertheless perfectly accurate. There’s the Continental Hotel, with the late Lance Reddick exuding sympathy and understanding in his final film appearance as Charon, taking the assassin’s coin from Eve and checking her in to a nice room.  

There’s Winston (Ian McShane), courtly as always, counseling Eve not to do what he knows she’s going to do and then helping her to do it. Eve is bent on finding and assassinating those responsible for murdering her parents in the electrifying home invasion by a platoon of killers that destroys her childhood as well as starting the movie with a bang.

And of course, there’s John Wick (Keanu Reeves), not dead yet by any means, CGI’d here to look considerably younger. I’m not actually spoiling anything — it’s been out for a while now that John Wick is “briefly” present in this spin-off. Well, without spoiling it, let’s just say, even in their brevity, his scenes are so wonderfully satisfying, Ballerina can be considered a genuine John Wick sequel.

This film represents the time period between the third and fourth Wick films, and Eve meets him at the ballet academy as he’s on his way to a never-pleasant meeting with the Director. Eve asks Wick, “How do I do what you do?” and he responds with laconic melancholy, “Looks like you’re already doing it.” He reminds her that she still has a choice — she can still escape this way of life. He’ll keep reminding her of that in more and more hilariously violent circumstances.

Certainly, the incredibly high standard of inventive fight choreography in the John Wick series is upheld in Ballerina. It’ll be a matter of taste which one is your favorite. I lean toward the one in which the only thing Eve has to use as a weapon against many heavily armed assailants is a pair of ice skates tied together by their long laces. Needless to say, she makes it work.

But the popular favorite will probably be when Eve arms herself with a flamethrower. This gets more interesting when one of the scarier villains, who looks eerily like Dolph Lundgren, arms himself the same way and it’s flamethrower vs. flamethrower. Then something happens and she loses her weapon and has to improvise, so it becomes flamethrower vs. big fire department water hose. The overhead shots are to die for.

The movie starts well and, incredibly, just keeps getting better in relentless action film terms. Eve’s discovery of her ultimate enemy takes her to the leader of a quietly berserk clan, the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne), a kind of chillingly sick, all-powerful patriarchal figure ruling over an entire wintry town in Austria. The Director differentiates the Ruska Roma from this mad crew by calling them a “cult” that kills for sport.

When Eve has to take on an entire snowy Austrian village, with many of the attacking villagers wearing cozy sweaters while armed to the teeth, it’s a deliriously funny variation on John Wick’s battles against every rival assassin in the world.

Ballerina is getting some bad reviews by people who don’t like action films and have no ability to understand how the genre works. As always, ignore them. The clueless commentary is laughable, with the New York Times offering up the snootiest take:

A luxe orgy of mass murder, “Ballerina” dances from one bloody melee to another, its back-of-a-matchbook plot (by Shay Hatton) driven solely by arterial motives.

The complaints about the lack of complex plotting in action films is a classic idiot’s take. The “back-of-a-matchbook plot” in John Wick films is mocked even in Ballerina, when the Director is overheard rebuking John Wick for creating such an epic bloodbath over a puppy (in case you’ve been living under a rock, that’s the plot of the first John Wick movie). He responds wearily, “It wasn’t just over a puppy.” Though the killing of John Wick’s puppy was plenty as far as motivating all-out revenge.

But it’s true that the puppy represented infinitely more. In the literal sense, the puppy was a gift from John Wick’s cancer-stricken wife, who wanted to give him something to love before she died. Wick had escaped the Ruska Roma and buried his weapons cache for the sake of living a peaceful life with his wife, outside of the world of crime and professional killing. So to lose her and the puppy would mean he had nothing left that he cared about but a really nice car. When thugs led by a rich, dissipated gangster’s son broke into his house, killed his puppy, and stole his classic 1969 Ford Mustang, they effectively took everything he had left in the world.

There’s a pertinent line by leftist poet Federico García Lorca that goes around in meme form on social media: “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.”

John Wick certainly isn’t presented as literally impoverished — in fact, some of the joys of the films are the luxurious world of assassins he returns to, where every necessity can be “bought” with symbolic coins that operate as signifiers of citizenship and membership in good standing, which is the opposite of our humiliating relationship to money and the lack of it. But his agony at being stripped of all he cares about stands in nicely for the working-class sense of desperately hanging on to what little they’ve got against rapacious forces determined on taking it all.

Even the rhythm of the fight scenes, with the relentless waves of assault that world-weary John Wick has to fight off, take on the quality of endless, numbing, burdensome struggle. It’s an over-the-top exaggeration of the kind of grind that most working people live out every day.

Ballerina has the same kinds of fight structures, but the vibrant Eve Macarro protagonist is still young — so young it seems to make John Wick even more tired just talking to her. Her larger struggle is angled toward feminist fury, another way of taking on the overwhelming forces in the world. In Ballerina, that still involves endless numbers of antagonists trying to bring you down. Presumably, if all goes according to plan, a series of sequels will chart the gradual erosion of her youthful brio, until she begins to understand the spirit behind John Wick’s advice to save herself, to bail out of the endless battles, to “just leave.”

“Why don’t you leave?” Eve asks him early in the film.

“I’m working on it,” he says with heavy irony.

We know how that turned out. Eve won’t be able to just leave either, but she’ll be working on it with ever world-wearier determination for three or four sequels at least, charting the path toward middle-aged exhaustion in search of the escape hatch that doesn’t exist.

And I am here for those sequels.