Ballerina review – Ana de Armas racks up the kills as she pirouettes into John Wick spin

T hat title could cause confusion. The film might accidentally tap into the Frozen customer-base, and millions of wide-eyed little girls in sparkly tutus and tiaras will show up at cinemas with their mums and dads to watch Keanu Reeves let a heavy-set gangster have it in the chops with a round from his specially customised Glock. Well, the confusion is deliberate. Here, the delicacy of ballet and the violence of martial arts are conflated. In this new spin-off feature from Keanu’s John Wick action franchise – an auxiliary episode on the timeline, between Wick episodes Three and Four , when JW was lying low, recovering from injuries – a mysterious new action-slash-classical-dance heroine called Eve now grands-jetés her way into the franchise, played by the always stylish Ana de Armas. JW