Prelude in Powder and Flame
There are movies you watch. And then there are movies you feel—movies that detonate inside your ribcage like a cluster grenade. Ballerina, the feral and fabulous spin-kick out of the John Wick Cinematic Universe, is the latter.
I caught it in Dolby, which is to say: inside a cathedral carved from sound. And every bullet, every bone snap, every krrrack of a shattering neck or blade against femur resounded like a mass held for the gods of ultraviolence. If you’re watching this on your cracked iPhone with dollar store earbuds, know this: you’re not watching it. You’re missing the sermon.

Welcome to the Opera of Annihilation
Ana de Armas steps into the ballet flats of revenge and ritual with full commitment—graceful, lethal, and charismatic in the way only a dancer trained to kill can be. She’s less an actress here and more a kinetic sculpture of rage. And around her, the rogues’ gallery assembles:
Keanu? Here.
Diego from Umbrella Academy? Present.
Sam Porter Bridges? Loaded and ready.
The staff of the Continental? Clocked in.
And Lance Reddick? Oh. Yes. The man himself. Posthumous, angelic, and met with thunderous applause by our Dolby cult.
Commander Zavala made the house cry.


Grenades. So Many Grenades.
There’s a point in Ballerina where the grenades just keep coming. Like someone in the writing room whispered, “What if Call of Duty but infinite grenades?” and nobody said no. And you know what? Thank God they didn’t.
This movie is 80% gunpowder, 20% trauma backstory—and that is exactly the ratio this kind of symphonic butchery deserves. Don’t come for plot. Come for velocity. Come for velocity shaped like a woman.

Family, But Make It Flamethrowers
Yes, yes, there’s narrative glue. There's the requisite, “you were always my sister/cousin/daughter/clone” melodrama. And sure, it smells a little like telenovela incense. But it fits. Because Ballerina isn’t pretending to be subtle. It's not here to subvert tropes—it’s here to immolate them with grace.
We're talking underworld dynasties. Russian madames with scars like metaphors. Shadow cabals with codes of conduct stricter than your HOA. All stylized, all soaked in gunmetal and operatic grief. You’ve seen these archetypes before, but never dressed quite so sharply or moving quite so fast.

Let’s talk action:
It’s fucking immaculate.
Limbs fly. Cars explode. Bodies get disassembled mid-air. The choreography is so precise it feels surgical, like violence rendered with a scalpel dipped in gasoline. Every scene flows like fluid, cuts like scripture, and builds like a drumline that only plays in headshots.
And it’s funny too. Not “haha” funny. More “I just watched Ana de Armas liquidate a village of bastards and I’m smiling like a psychopath” funny. This is the humor of stylish obliteration, the giddy awe of beautifully-rendered carnage.

Ballerina > John Wick 4, Fight Me
Hot take? Maybe. But I’d rather watch Ballerina five more times than sit through the lore-dump-heavy, dialogue-drunk slog of John Wick 4. This film remembers what made Wick fun—not the monologues or metaphysics, but the momentum.
Where Wick 4 waxes philosophical, Ballerina throws a kitchen sink full of knives through a flaming window.

Go 👏 See 👏 This 👏 In 👏 Theaters👏
I’ve rarely seen a crowd so alive at the end of a screening. Cheering. Clapping. Cackling. Like we’d just been baptized in napalm and left wanting more. This isn’t just a movie—it’s a party hosted by demons in tuxedos, scored to bullets, and decorated with shrapnel confetti.

If it’s still playing in Dolby near you, go. Skip dinner. Sell plasma. Do whatever you must.
You don’t want to miss this.
Because violence, when done this well, becomes art. And art, when done with this much blood and flair, becomes divine.
Now playing. Bring earplugs. And holy water.
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