Ballerina review: Ana de Armas John Wick spinoff has good fights, bad everything else

Running time: 125 minutes.Rated R (strong/bloody violence throughout, and language).

In theaters.Even assassins get a universe now. Continuing the weedy sprawl of a franchise that hardly needs it is “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,” an origin-to-revenge story about Eve, a dancer and a paid murderer played by Ana de Armas. Call her Killing Eve II.Or Wick the Worse.The first four “John Wick” films, starring Keanu Reeves, are fantastic and artful orgies of death with stunner locations such as Sacré-Cœur stairs in Paris and the Moroccan desert.The imagery is often breathtaking, and Reeves’ steely resolve more than makes up for the thinness of the plots.Too bad “Ballerina” drops the ball.

Despite being led by an actress who once took on the role of Marilyn Monroe, it’s a much less attractive movie — downright ugly sometimes.The fights are as brutal and thrilling as they should be: knives to the face, hammers to the face, grenades to the face.The face always loses.But the tale of Eve, whose assassin father was offed before she was taken to the Ruska Roma in New York to be trained in the dark arts by a phoning-it-in Anjelica Huston, is a recycled schlep.

A blah de bourrée.This Len Wiseman-directed flick is 45 minutes shorter than “John Wick 4,” but spiritually, it’s longer than jury duty.As a boring adult, Eve learns to pirouette and execute. “Fight like a girl,” her teacher tells her.

What a script! She obsessively stares at a toy ballerina from her childhood that spins as music from “Swan Lake” plays.It’s a tad on the nose — or beak, as it were.All the while, she is dead set on finding the baddies responsible for doing in her dad 12 years earlier.

All she knows is that the men have an “X” scar on their wrists. The journey to subdue Mr.Ex is basically a bar crawl.Whereas John Wick traveled to exotic places and fought in architecturally fun spaces — museums filled with mirrors and glass, art-deco vaults — mu...