Monthly Archives: May 2025

The Wick Risk


The reason John Wick works is because it never promised more than blood, silence, and style — and delivered all three like a bullet to the head.

That’s what makes Ballerina, the upcoming Ana de Armas-led spin-off, such a risk.

Set between John Wick: Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, it follows Rooney, a ballerina-assassin out for revenge against the people who murdered her family. A simple setup. A familiar rhythm. But maybe too familiar.

Because John Wick isn’t a universe. It’s a mood.

It’s not mythology. It’s momentum.

What made the original film so electric wasn’t world-building — it was world-suggesting. We caught glimpses of an underground economy, cryptic rules, and crimson-lit corridors where death was bartered like currency. But none of it slowed down to explain. It was all texture, never textbook.

Wick kills. Wick reloads. Wick walks away.

That’s the spell. And it worked, again and again.

But Ballerina pulls at that thread. It asks: what if we step away from Wick and focus on the world he tried to leave behind?

It’s a gamble.

Franchise thinking says: spin it off, scale it out, give every side character a saga. But John Wick was never supposed to be scalable. It was elegant in its constraint. A man, a dog, a gun. That’s all it took.

Add too much — backstory, exposition, lore — and the whole thing starts to wobble.

Even Chapter 4, for all its grandeur, skirted the edge of overreach. What saved it was clarity: John Wick was still at the center.

Now we get a new lead, a new motive, and possibly, a new tone.

Ana de Armas has chops. That isn’t the question.

The question is whether we want to know more about the world John Wick walked through — or whether the power was in not knowing.

The danger isn’t failure. It’s forgettability.

Wick never needed to be explained. He needed to be felt. His story had weight because it was lean, not layered.

Ballerina may work. It may stun. It may carve out its own brutal ballet. But every time the Wick-verse stretches, it risks snapping what held it together in the first place.

Cool is hard to maintain.

And mystery doesn’t get sequels.

I Think I Wanted to Write This

I Think I Wanted to Write This

I think I wanted to write this.
But the thought arrived
already half-formed—
like light from a star
that died before I was born.

Somewhere, a boy
chose the clarinet
over the trumpet
and called it a decision.
But it was the weight of the case,
the shine of the reed,
the tone of his father’s voice
when he said,
“That’s a good sound.”

We are constellations
mistaking ourselves for maps.
We name the stars
and think we invented the sky.

We want to believe
in choice—
because we want
to believe in belief.
Faith in freedom
becomes the freedom.

But show me where intent begins—
not action,
but prelude to action,
the whisper behind impulse,
the first flicker
of the invisible match.

Every neuron fires
because of another,
because of a childhood,
because of a sugar crash,
because the dog barked
at 3:07 a.m.

We speak of choice
as if we were not
born mid-sentence,
handed a script
with half the words
smudged.

I think I wanted to write this.
But maybe it was the only thing
I could have written.