Why John Wick’s world still spins around revenge

The John Wick saga was never meant to be a movement. It started with a man, a dog, and a grief that cut too deep to sit still. That first gunshot wasn’t just the beginning of a shootout—it was the beginning of a cult built around vengeance.

And now, as the universe stretches with spin-offs like Ballerina and The Continental, there’s still one thing holding it all together. Not style. Not worldbuilding. Just good old-fashioned revenge.

Revenge, in the John Wick universe, is more than a plot device—it’s a philosophical engine. Psychoanalysis sees vengeance as a compulsive return to trauma, while thinkers like Žižek and Nietzsche argue it’s about restoring lost meaning or justifying violence through moral frameworks. Wick doesn’t kill for closure; he kills to rebalance a world that wronged him, making each bullet part ritual, part reckoning.

The franchise turns vengeance into choreography—Merleau-Ponty would say the body speaks where words fail, and in Wick’s case, violence becomes a language.

Philosophers from Girard to Jung view vengeance as a structured, sacred necessity, rather than a chaotic force. Even Kristeva notes its power to help audiences reclaim control over loss. Wick’s revenge isn’t heroic—it’s mythic, necessary (at least to him), and deeply human. It blurs the line between law and morality, transforming pain into motion and motion into purpose.

In Ballerina, vengeance doesn’t arrive gently. It drags its feet, covered in blood and ballet shoes. The story revolves around Eve Macarro, a character carrying more than her weight in grief.

Her father’s murder wasn’t just a tragic past; it was a wound that never scabbed. What makes it worse—or more twisted—is who the killer is. Not a stranger. Not a rival. Her grandfather, the Chancellor of a cult so deranged that they don’t just kill for contracts—they kill for joy. That, right there, shifts the tone. This isn’t about hired guns anymore. This is about a family tradition of revenge.

There’s a moment when Eve meets John Wick. It’s quiet, profound, almost sacred. She asks him how one becomes the Baba Yaga. His answer isn’t a speech about training or tactics. He just looks at her—looks—and says she’s already on the path. Why? Because he sees it in her eyes. That same hunger. That same ache. Vengeance.

Throughout the film, Eve isn’t chasing leads; she’s chasing ghosts. One of them is marked by a small symbol—a cross under the palm.

She’s told it identifies members of the same brutal cult that took her father. When she finally finds a man with the mark, she doesn’t just kill him.

She slices off his hand. Not out of necessity. Out of fury. A phone could’ve done the job. But phones don’t bleed. And vengeance demands something visceral.

Even the world around her seems to understand. The director of Ruska Roma makes it clear—Eve has what others don’t. Tatiana, another ballerina, lacked the rage. The edge. “She didn’t have the qualities required,” he says. But Eve? She’s driven by something sharper than technique. That psychic engine, always humming beneath her movements, is revenge.

And Ballerina doesn’t shy away from that inheritance. It borrows from Wick’s world not just in aesthetic—the recreated gunshop scene is a wink to longtime fans—but in its emotional architecture. These stories are stitched together by rage, grief, and the unrelenting need to settle the score.

Even the villain, the Chancellor of the cult, isn’t just evil for the sake of it. He killed Eve’s father because of some past grudge. A circle of vengeance, breeding more vengeance. The more things change in the Wick-verse, the more the bullets point backwards.

When Wick is sent to Hallstatt to bring Eve back, it’s not just a mission. It’s a passing of the torch. He sees something in her that mirrors what once burned in him. And that’s where the franchise gets it right. It’s not the shootouts that hold the audience—it’s the motive behind them. Vengeance turns violence into narrative, at least here in the universe of John Wick. It justifies the chaos. It gives weight to every broken bone.

Strip it all down—the choreography, the suits, the elaborate rules—and what’s left is revenge.

That’s the spine of the saga. Without it, the whole thing collapses into noise. However, with it, the Wick universe becomes something entirely different. A belief system. A place where pain is sacred, and every trigger pulled is a form of remembrance.

Because at the end of the day, cinema doesn’t need to be polite. It needs to be honest. That’s why Ballerina works. Not because it spins like a ballet. But because every twirl ends in blood.

The John Wick franchise doesn’t dress vengeance up as noble or glamorous—it shows it for what it is: messy, painful, and endless. But its success suggests something quietly unsettling. People recognise the feeling. They carry it, buried beneath politeness and routine. Maybe that’s the real hook—not the action or the suits, but the silent nod to a part of the human condition that often goes unspoken.

It taps into a need for justice when justice feels distant. It reminds viewers that even in a brutal world, there’s still a way—however flawed—to say: this was not okay. That matters.

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