Ballerina's Best Action Scene Is As Inventive As Anything In John Wick

Yeah, I'm thinking spoiler warnings are back. Continue reading only after watching "Ballerina" (or "From the World of John Wick: Ballerina," if you're nasty).

Finally, over a decade after the first "John Wick" movie arrived and promptly rewrote how we look at action movies, the series has experienced its first big-screen expansion into franchise territory. (Apologies to the woefully forgotten prequel TV show "The Continental," which you're probably hearing about for the very first time, I'd wager.) The question of whether we truly needed a spin-off movie about a new character originating from one of the Wick-verse's many colorful factions of assassins is certainly a valid one, and the jury remains out for the time being. But, from a more metatextual point of view, the idea of whether a "John Wick" movie centered on someone other than Keanu Reeves' title character could possibly sustain itself might be even more compelling.

Even the most cynical of viewers will likely walk away from "Ballerina" convinced that Ana de Armas holds her own (and then some) as our new vengeance-driven hero Eve Macarro, but star power is only half the battle in a "John Wick" movie. What adrenaline junkies everywhere needed to be convinced of, more than anything else, was whether a movie from director Len Wiseman (known for 2003's "Underworld," "Live Free or Die Hard," and the "Total Recall" remake in 2012) could live up to the sky-high standards set by Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's approach to gunfighting action. On that count, at least, audiences may end up pleasantly surprised by what "Ballerina" has to offer throughout various set pieces highlighted by the use of rubber bullets, flamethrowers, and, perhaps most impressively of all, a bandolier of grenades. When the smoke clears, what we're left with is a number of clever, gruesome, and inventive sequences that we've simply never seen in a "John Wick" film before.

In a departure from the relatively straightforward Keanu Reeves-led thrillers, "Ballerina" is broken up into almost episodic segments over an extended period of time. The first mission we see is Eve Macarro's debut in the field, tasked with protecting a young woman (played by actor Sooyoung Choi) from her own wealthy and powerful father. This brings the newly-unleashed recruit of the Ruska Roma to one of the most visually stunning locations in the entire franchise: a freezing nightclub practically carved right out of the ice. Combined with the complication of having to use rubber bullets, Eve is immediately faced with a challenge unlike any that John Wick ever had to face.

This was very much the point, as director Len Wiseman explained to /Film's Ben Pearson in a recent interview. "Say she had a gun in the club. It would feel like something we've seen before," according to Wiseman. Giving her a gun that only shoots rubber bullets certainly goes a long way towards upping the tension and stakes, putting our rookie protagonist on the defensive and resulting in a sequence where she dishes out punishment just as often as she has to take it. Compared to the relentless machine that Wick typically is, armed with bulletproof suits and a seemingly endless supply of weaponry, "Ballerina" quickly establishes how this character couldn't be more different from the legendary Baba Yaga.

That's not all the blockbuster has to offer, however. The flamethrower battle has been splashed all across the marketing, and for good reason. The movie gets a ton of mileage out of slow-motion shots of flames devouring everything (and everyone) in their path and, as it turns out, that was entirely practical. Wiseman went on to tell /Film about how the creative team arrived at this particular set piece: "One of the things that was really [important] is always striving to do something different, something that we haven't seen. So we've seen a flamethrower in an action movie here and there, but never as a gun battle, a close-quarters, indoors, just a gun battle with flamethrowers." If the "John Wick" movies have always felt like elemental forces of nature, "Ballerina" takes that quite literally. But even this exercise in excess pales in comparison to the best sequence in the entire feature.

Who could've ever imagined that a Russian mobster killing a puppy in cold blood over 10 years ago would eventually lead to the most brutal and explosive grenade fight you've ever seen depicted in film? The arc of the "John Wick" franchise has taken some incredible twists and turns over the years, but its overwhelming success ultimately made it possible for "Ballerina" to arrive on the scene and stage as complex and thrilling a set piece as we've ever seen in these movies before. Move over, John Wick and all your perfectly-placed headshots. The grenade-fest sequence on display roughly halfway through "Ballerina" might just rival anything the mainline series has to offer — including that vaunted knife fight in "John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum."

The most innovative fight in "Ballerina" comes when we least expect it. Throughout the series, the weapons sommelier has always provided a fun break from the action as Wick goes shopping for the deadliest wares available. In this case, the typically unassuming scene suddenly devolves into chaos when henchmen stage a massive invasion of the Continental-protected safe space and force Eve to come up with some genuinely inspired bits of improvisation to survive. Bottlenecked into an underground bunker that doubles as a gun cache, Eve finally picks her weapon of choice: a bandolier of grenades. From that point onwards, viewers are subjected to one of the bloodiest and goriest battles the Wick-verse has ever unleashed. Blast doors, tables, and even the mouths of her enemies become perfect opportunities for carefully-placed grenades to inflict as much damage as possible. The only thing more fascinating than this mayhem, as it turns out, is how this sequence originated. According to Wiseman:

"Yes, we've seen grenades in action movies before, but I pitched this as, 'What if it was a snowball fight, but with grenades? Also indoors, close-quarters.' So then it creates a scene that is entirely new. I don't think we've seen anything like that."

It's safe to say that this is precisely the kind of action we want from "John Wick" movies. Our full Len Wiseman interview is well worth checking out in its entirety, and "Ballerina" is now playing in theaters.