No Ballerina Needed: 7 Years Ago, the Ultimate Female John Wick Hit the Screens
While Ana de Armas and Keanu Reeves are cooking their John Wick spin-off, the perfect fem!Wick has already been made by Charlize Theron and James McAvoy.
In the vast world of action movies, few genres are as popular and captivating as superspy/assassin flicks that follow highly-trained professionals on a mission. There’s something special about the atmosphere of distrust, political scheming, and ridiculously high stakes that comes with this subgenre, and the audience is all over it.
Keanu Reeves ’ John Wick franchise changed the action movie landscape, and there’s a spin-off with Ana de Armas in development. But there’s no need to, really.
Perfect Female John Wick Already Exists
While Ana de Armas’ Ballerina looks promising, we already have the ultimate female equivalent of Keanu Reeves’ John Wick thanks to director David Leitch. In 2017, he released a movie called Atomic Blonde starring Charlize Theron and James McAvoy, and if you didn’t think it was the perfect fem!Wick, we don’t know what to tell you.
Atomic Blonde follows an MI6 superspy Lorraine Broughton who’s sent to the deadliest and most complex missions. During the Cold War, she’s tasked with retrieving an extremely sensitive dossier of double agents from Berlin and investigate her colleague’s death, but what she finds is a massive espionage ring. Its schemes can ruin everything she’s worked for, and the game suddenly becomes much harder.
Atomic Blonde: Certified Fresh & Forgotten
No matter how you look at it, 2017’s Atomic Blonde was a success. At the box office, David Leitch’s movie more than tripled its production budget, raking up $100M worldwide against the $30M spent on it, and received great reviews all around.
On Rotten Tomatoes, Atomic Blonde boasts the Certified Fresh status with its 79% Critic Score and 64% Audience Score. IMDb gave the film a 6.7/10, supporting the claim. Despite everything, Charlize Theron’s superspy outing was wrongly forgotten for the most part, but now is the time you check it out if you haven’t already.
After all, there’s quite some time left before Ballerina’s release, so why not enjoy the already-existing high-stakes action-fueled superspy thriller with great actors?