TL;DR: It definitely feels like a movie from that franchise, but also manages to be different enough to be worth a watch.

Young Eve sees her father murdered by an organized unit. She ends up killing one of them. After the event, she is picked up and brought to Ruska Roma, the tribe that John Wick belonged to. There she learns to kill so that she can go out and take vengeance on her father’s killers while learning secrets about herself.

Does the plot matter? Not really. This is just one of those movies. The plot is there to bring you from one brutal action scene to the next.

And the action is brutal. In this way the movie is very much like the John Wick movies. There is a physicality to the action, because they are very much based on stunts, just like John Wick. However, as the movie tells us early on, the men will always be stronger than Eve, so she should fight like a girl. Again, the movie is very physical, but Ana de Armas is much younger (well over 20 years, actually) and lighter than Keanu Reeves, which gives them a lot of possibilities stunt-wise.

They also play around with weapons. You might have seen the flamethrower in the trailer (sorry, if this was a spoiler), but while that is fun, my favorite is a short sequence where she only has grenades available to her. Grenades are not usually handled very well in movies, as they are mostly used either to force the hero or heroes to move or as funny ways to kill enemies. Here, they find ways to use them much more effectively and interestingly. That’s the kind of thing I enjoy as what happens so often these days is paying your way out of creativity with huge CG budgets, but here they just do something different.

The world is built a little bit, but that doesn’t go fully out of hand like in John Wick 3. It is still that kind of anachronistic and out-of-time world with it’s rules and traditions that are meant to be broken by the hero.

Ana de Armas feels very different as the hero. While Wick is rugged and stoic, there is a vulnerability to Eve, which sets her apart from him. This might just be that we first meet her as a child, but that also works to her advantage. It is just that much easier to get behind her, because she isn’t just the ultimate killing machine from the start.

I definitely enjoyed the movie more than I expected. I was pretty skeptical about a spin-off directed by Len Wiseman (who has never before made a movie I feel I could recommend), but they delivered. This isn’t a masterpiece, but if you have enjoyed the series before, it won’t disappoint you.

UPDATE: Okay, I heard that the team behind John Wick kind of fixed the movie after Wiseman was done with it to fit their general style and aesthetic. This explains how the movie is so much better than anything he has directed before. This also explains how Lance Reddick, who died in 2023, appears in the movie.

Of course, reshoots are not unusual in modern big budget movies and often they are just part of the process with money allotted to them from the start, but that’s mostly when hugely relying on CG and obviously this movie doesn’t (and isn’t exactly big budget either).