The trick to inserting your established unstoppable badass into your spinoff film without weakening the lead character of said spinoff film is careful, deliberate measurement.

So, yes, I watched Ballerina last night. And to get into my thoughts here I’ll have to spoil certain things about it. I intend not to give away all the movie’s tricks, mind you, because if you’re into the Wick-verse movies at all then I also can easily recommend this installment, so you should get to enjoy as much of it as you can as a fresh experience.

These films are, as ever, violent nonsense. Please don’t misunderstand me: They’re fun and brilliantly crafted nonsense, but be honest with yourself here. If you stop and think about any single “but how does that work” aspect, you’re taken out of the movie. It can’t hold up against that kind of scrutiny. One of the key things the filmmakers do in these various Wick installments is to avoid hanging lampshades or winking at the camera. Ever. The moment a character goes, “Wow, that was pretty unbelievable, huh?” the gig is up. So they absolutely don’t. Thus, by making smart choices, it somehow all kinda works. At least, well enough for an audience to go along for the ride for a couple hours.

Every franchise installment takes pains to establish that this is a heightened and larger-than-life world, tilted at a disturbing angle from our own. This is myth. This is legend. This is scary stories around the campfire. Spooky tales about unstoppable assassins. Or maybe that’s about houses with chicken legs.

(Look, I’ve watched the MST3K of the Russo-Finnish co-production Jack Frost too many times to take all of the John Wick “Baba Yaga” stuff at all seriously. Doesn’t take away from my general enjoyment of the films but I still snicker a bit every time someone in one of these movies whispers “Baba Yaga” in a portentous manner.)

So you’ve got this blockbuster movie franchise and you want to eke some more gas out of the tank before it runs dry. (Have you seen the movie? Yes, that was on purpose.) One solution is to spin off characters into their own headlining installments. That’s the point of Ballerina. We’re introduced to a (mostly?) new character who’s sort of Wick-adjacent, with highly overlapping but not identical skillsets. They chose to focus on a female protagonist, Eve, and one of the neat things about that is that it doesn’t go against the established main-sequence films at all: The Wick-verse establishes early on that anybody from any background can be a lethal force to be reckoned with. This is absolutely not a case of “girls can be cool now, too!” because that’s just never been an actual issue here.

Hollywood, in our real reality, however, isn’t so sure. Thus, to make sure we get “butts in seats” for this installment, a choice is made: Get Keanu Reeves into this movie. Great! Wick is one of his great iconic roles, so if he’s up for it, and it helps the movie, let’s do that. But… how do you introduce the iconic unstoppable lethal force of this film series’ universe to a spinoff installment without making the new lead character look weak in their own movie or without weakening your iconic unstoppable (etc) guy by letting the new lead character beat them up?

The solution is kind of brilliant, and it’s done with careful measures.

First things first, the two characters’ roles are different. Many of the same skills? Yes. The difference is the purposes they’re put to. Wick’s job is to kill people dead. (“In case you thought there was some sort of live sort of killin‘,” as a particular stand-up comic once joked about a bug spray’s advertising slogan.) Eve’s job is basically to run the kind of escort quests that drive us crazy when we’re doing them in an MMORPG game: She’s there to keep someone alive when swarms of baddies are gunning for them. The fact that the movie kind of forgets this in the back half is… an artifact of the kind of story being told, honestly. I’ll let that slide.

One thing that the (surprisingly good) training montage and most of Eve’s action set pieces reinforce is that she’s great at improvising solutions. She shoots the hell out of various cannon fodder, sure, but she spends almost as much time with non-gun weapons (and sometimes not even actual weapon weapons), giving the movie a kind of “what if Jackie Chan, but hyper-violent” vibe. Can’t complain about that, really.

They’ve made the leads just distinct enough that their intersections are at some kind of angle instead of being nearly parallel lines. Good. Then they make a point of seeding Wick into Eve’s story just a bit, with a sequence that feels more like a cameo than anything else. (I can imagine an un-spoilered viewer going, “Is that it? Lame!” in the moment.) They even have a brief conversation… that I thought was kind of clunky, but, whatever. The important parts of this are that we’ve established the timeline (by showing a different angle on a key moment in the main film sequence’s storyline) and we’ve given the two characters at least some kind of moment to hang their later interactions on, instead of having Wick show up cold (as it were, and sorry, spoilers) for the grand finale set-pieces and trying to have him sort out what’s going on with zero prior human connection to work with.

But you can’t have your badass action hero movie with a bigger scarier badass action character in it without either turning it into a buddy movie or pitting the two against one another at some point. (“Both” is also an option, I suppose.) The Wick-verse isn’t prone to the former, so we’re going to get the latter. How are they going to balance this?

Hilariously… they don’t bother. When Eve faces off against Wick it’s not even remotely a well-matched contest. She’s good. But he’s a force of nature. And the choreography manages to be fair to them both, which I think was quite a neat trick to pull off. So why didn’t he just swat her like a bug? Because she’s not a “nobody,” and because he’s undoubtedly aware of the circumstances, and it’d be pretty hypocritical of him to disregard someone else from their particular organization going off on a kill-em-all vengeance quest, now wouldn’t it? So he’s doing everything he can not to outright kill her. He’s trying to convince her to walk away, to take the loss with at least a slim chance at a future intact.

She doesn’t, of course. What kind of movie would we have had, eh? So in the end, he gives her a loophole. Does it make a lot of sense? C’mon, remember what kind of movie you’re watching. It doesn’t need to make that much sense. This is a myth, a legend, a big noisy pile of gunfire and explosions.

After that point his function is mostly as backup, with a side of executioner if the loophole closes. We get to see him do his thing in between sequences where Eve goes all-out against… well, I don’t want to tell you the entire movie. It’s worth seeing, if Wick-verse stuff is at all your kind of fun. The point is, they used just the right amount, carefully measured, of John to give him things to do (and justify Reeves’ paycheck beyond “he did a cameo”) that are plot-relevant without letting him overwhelm Eve’s story.

As for the movie overall? I have a few quibbles, outside of the “well that’s just how these movies are” elements. The least-surprising surprise reveal was fine, big yawn, but there was another reveal that I actually didn’t see coming and that it looked like they were about to do something interesting with, and then… they didn’t. They closed the book on that possibility so quickly that I’m not sure why they bothered opening it in the first place. They could’ve saved a few minutes of screen time and lost literally nothing important. (It’s not even used as a motivating factor, because Eve was already hell-bent on her current path.) I won’t tell you what it was but believe me, you’ll know when you get there.

There’s some “I don’t get it, why did they even…?” bits. (Yes, you’re not supposed to think while watching these movies but finish the film and go back to a particular car crash and ask yourself, “How? Why?” and you’ll see my problem there. It’s a phenomenal shot and sequence on a technical level but makes zero sense in the overall plot. It shouldn’t have happened. Or maybe I missed something important. Entirely possible!) But you know what? Overall, the movie delivers on its promises. It includes some absolutely buckwild elements that I’d never have expected and has some fun along the way, for certain values of “fun.” I’m glad I watched it.