Best Keanu: “I’m working on it.”

Tonight I saw a new John Wick movie. I know it was John Wick not because that’s in the subtitle, or because the now-hobbling, aging assassin appears in several scenes, but because Ballerina felt like a John Wick movie. This movie, unlike the slick, oddly violent-for-no-reason and largely dull Continental, feels like it belongs in the franchise. That works in its favour. It makes up for Ballerina‘s slow parts, the drawbacks that make it just not quite there — but it comes close.

There’s a scene in the snow, well into the back half of the film, when the movie has picked up and slowly gotten better from its clunky, early phases, when you worry it’s going to be John Wick-lite (but still John Wick). In that scene, glimpsed in the movie’s trailer, Ana de Armas (Eve) and Keanu Reeves (John Wick) have a discussion, an assassin-world discussion, that turns into an obligatory faceoff. And you, in the audience, get a few precious seconds — or maybe just a precious quarter of a second — when your excitement goes up, because you realize, “oh! They’re going to fight!”

And you’re gleeful. And it’s a short, but satisfying, scene. And part of you wonders how you became this person: the one who, when she started this Keanu Reeves website a few years ago, wanted to put off watching the John Wick films because she “just doesn’t like violent movies.” There is a type of John Wick violence that is at once balletic and captivating, thrilling without turning dull. This action is on display in Ballerina, which has at least two scenes that fall nicely into what makes the franchise unique, in that the scenes are interesting and clever, with neat handoffs from one element to the next. It’s fun. It’s comforting to watch, because it is the best action fiction out there.

There are also, of course, the blatant ripoffs… okay, throwbacks… to the other John Wick movies. Gun-shopping, the operators. We get a great car sequence and several gun and hand-to-hand combat sets. What Ballerina seems to bring that’s new is a whole lot of fire, which I could have done without, but that comes near the end, where you already feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth.

Had I not just watched John Wick 4 a couple of days ago, I think I would have given Ballerina just 4/5 instead of 4.5/5, because Ballerina, one could argue, is pretty thin on plot and top-heavy on action. But rewatching JW4 in isolation, not having seen the first three in some time so they are not fresh in my memory, I realized that’s kind of thin on plot too — and definitely over the top. I get now those people who showed up to JW4 new to the franchise and couldn’t get what the fuss was all about. It’s a package, people. Yes, it’s all a bit outlandish, and violent, but you have to go through the whole 10 hours. Installment 4 is just the last three hours of a longer story. So I had to remind myself that those of us who like John Wick are going to fill in the world of Ballerina, so it can be a little thin — the action speaks for itself.

In the snow, Eve begs John to let her “finish it.” It’s a meaningful line, that shows clearly that the people behind Ballerina — unlike those behind, oh, say, The Continental — actually understand the franchise (and even a cursory scan of the credits confirms that is the case). Because the whole point of John Wick is that you can’t finish it. Venegeance finishes nothing. “No one, not even you, can kill everyone,” Koji tells John in JW4. It’s a lesson Eve has yet to learn, but there will be sequels to come.

[*]

It’s June 4, 2025, and it’s a Wednesday. I’d bought my ticket for the early access showing of Ballerina some time ago, and when today arrived, I was not in the mood to go. It’s been a long, exhausting, emotionally heavy few months which has evolved into the past few days where just moving through time has felt out of reach. But after a nap, I dragged myself to the theatre, and I was rewarded with the elevation of mood, from one of these very violent, very sensory-stimulating films.

I had a memory, as I was watching Eve and John in the snow, of writing about Knock Knock for this site. Ana de Armas and Keanu Reeves are capable, as actors, to give audiences a very satisfying fight scene in a movie a full ten years after offering up a very disturbing sex scene — I still refuse to rewatch. But my mind wandered back to that process of working through stuff by writing about all these movies. It helped. Today doesn’t seem so bad, because I’ve seen some John Wick and written about it. The days move on, and time becomes easier to move through.

June 2025