Why are the assassins learning to dance in this year’s John Wick spin-off? It’s not really clear.

A bout a year ago, I took a long flight from England to Washington, D.C., and passed the time by reviewing Abigail, a movie about a twelve-year-old vampire ballerina. Friends had urged me to watch it because my name is Abigail and I did ballet (although I’m not a vampire, yet). This past week, I took the same long flight from London to D.C. for my permanent move back home, and I once again watched a new movie about a killer ballerina: Ballerina, the latest installment in the John Wick franchise. I’m generally not a fan of action movies because blood makes me queasy, and long combat sequences just don’t excite me, but I was hopeful that Ballerina — despite scenes certain to make me flinch — would prove enchanting by infusing dance elements throughout the settings and gripping fight scenes.

I was disappointed, even in the context of a John Wick spin-off: I didn’t expect a full act of Swan Lake, but I at least thought ballet would be a relevant theme throughout. It was hardly depicted or mentioned. Eve Macarro (played by Ana de Armas in scenes where she’s an adult) is orphaned after witnessing the murder of her father. Eve has a music box with a wind-up ballerina twirling inside, an object that is meaningful to her for a reason that is never really explained; we, the viewers, are left to assume the music box represents a memory of her father and an affinity for ballet. Once she is parentless, a man familiar with the assassin network known as Ruska Roma finds her with the figurine and brings her to a school where assassins-in-training take a wide range of classes, from shooting to ballet. (It isn’t entirely clear in Ballerina whether the Ruska Roma criminal organization requires its agents to take ballet because the art form provides beneficial physical skills like flexibility, or if the dance classes are a front operation to conceal what else goes on. We are supposed to just accept that the murderous spies have ballet training.) Early in the movie, Eve is onstage attempting to do fouettés, a somewhat challenging step that is often done 32 times in the coda of a pas de deux (meaning a duet), but she keeps falling to the floor rather dramatically. (Certainly, slips happen in the dance world, but repeatedly wiping out over the same step is unusual.) The movie ends with Eve going to watch her old friend from the dormitory, who was dismissed from Ruska Roma for not having the fighter instinct, star in a ballet performance.

And that’s basically every ballet-related moment in the two-hour-long movie. I kept waiting for ballet to be an important feature of Eve’s character development, but her only personality trait is seeking revenge. I anticipated that Eve would deliver some monologue about how ballet provided her with a certain skillset that enabled her to defeat a ton of fighting-age males in a cult. You can imagine a speech that makes the following points:

I, Eve Macarro, am a woman and therefore have certain weaknesses that will hinder me in combat. However, my hours in the dance studio enhanced my balance, flexibility, jumps, and spins, as well as developed my high tolerance for pain and an ability to recover quickly. As a result of ballet training, I am able to quietly tiptoe through narrow spaces without getting caught, stretch my limbs in unexpected directions to avoid being whacked, jump far to escape quickly, and spin around violently without getting dizzy, all of which are unique skills that surprise and fluster my enemies. They say to “always keep your opponent on their toes,” but if you’re fighting a ballerina like me, that’s where I’m most powerful.

Although there’s a moment earlier in the movie when a coach tells Eve that she has to be scrappy — “improvise, adapt, cheat” — because she’s at a disadvantage due to her size, there’s never any discussion of how ballet might serve as an advantage. The action scenes, while intricately choreographed and certainly entertaining, didn’t seem to incorporate Eve’s dance training; in the fights, there isn’t a grand leap or any movement that resembles ballet steps. Had the screenwriters made an effort to explain that Eve has a repertoire of nimble movements from dance classes that bewilder her burly opponents, I would have found it easier to believe that she defeated a local militia, including its leader.

Maybe I am woefully misguided, or too personally invested in the subject, but I think ballet should be somewhat germane in a movie titled Ballerina. Emphasizing Eve’s ballet aptitude would have actually improved the movie by aiding our suspension of disbelief; some dialogue about Eve maneuvering through physical fights with unanticipated ballet movements would provide some logical justification for her feats because we all know a lone woman would not last long against a muscular man, let alone a local army of them. Why not use the ribbons on a pointe shoe to strangle someone, or perhaps blind a dude with a bottle of hairspray that is always kept backstage? Honestly, there were plenty of opportunities to draw inspiration from ballet, yet the movie seized none of them. Since ballet — even dance more broadly — has zero bearing on the plot or the main character’s traits, a more appropriate title for this movie would have been “Assassin,” “Spy Woman,” or maybe just “Ana de Armas Looks Sexy While Killing Bad Guys with a Flamethrower.”