Summary
Pretty Lethal largely wastes a great premise and, sadly, Uma Thurman, but on the plus side, it does deliver one of the year’s true stand-out action sequences.
To be clear, there’s a third-act action sequence in Pretty Lethal that is one of the year’s best, and will likely remain so. It’s a truly bravura set-piece that I’m fairly sure the movie in its entirety exists to accommodate, like someone came up with the idea for it first and had to freestyle a narrative justification for it after. Everything that is great about it – a sense of novelty, poise, imagination, and watchmaker-precise choreography – is sadly missing from the rest of the flick, which feels like a chimeric mash-up of action from John Wick (though nowhere near the standard of the actual John Wick Ballerina movie), outfits and dance moves from The Nutcracker, and a general sense of seedy rural European grime from Eli Roth’s Hostel.
As far as elevator pitches go, one including all three of those titles mentioned above should be demented enough to work. And in large stretches, Pretty Lethal does work, but in a kind of disappointingly functional and predictable way that doesn’t make good on the promise only truly embodied by that one action scene. The rest of it is diverting, buoyed by some game performances from an interesting young cast, but it just feels like any old blood-soaked thriller that is always on the cusp of letting loose but never quite commits to doing so until it’s too late.
The plot finds an American ballet troupe – if that’s the right collective noun for ballerinas – travelling to Budapest to compete in an international competition. The group consists of Bones (Maddie Ziegler), Grace (Avantika), Chloe (Millicent Simmonds, A Quiet Place), her sister Zoe (Iris Apatow, Tell Me Lies), and Princess (Lana Condor, To All the Boys), the latter of whom is the best character by a country mile and seems to have teleported in from a different movie that she’s the star of. As it stands, the group’s nominal leader is Bones, if only because she’s the only one with enough of an attitude to rally the others into fighting back when they realise that the remote inn where they have taken shelter after their bus breaks down is actually a haven for deranged European gangsters who have decided to have their way with them.
The proprietress of the inn is Devora, a former dancer of some renown who has now taken to stalking the halls of her minor kingdom and allowing the village’s ruffians to indulge in whatever fancies they please. In the movie’s least-inspired touch, Devora is played by Uma Thurman (Dexter: Resurrection, The Old Guard 2, who is woefully underused. Frankly, the idea of casting the Bride in a movie like this and not giving her an action sequence is unforgivable; it’s a clear case of getting a big name on the poster for no better reason than marketing. Thurman does a fine job, but Devora could have been played by anyone.
You’d think, given this, that the dancers are the focus. But that’s not quite accurate either. Bones and Princess are the only two whose names I didn’t have to look up while writing this review, and they’re the only two who’d qualify as actual characters, at least insofar as having personalities, a bit of growth, and a meaningful dynamic that evolves throughout the movie. It’s still paper-thin, but at least it’s there, which is more than can be said for the others.
Director Vicky Jewson has one good idea, though, which is to make the broad sweep of the movie a commentary on how brutal ballet dancing is. Initially, this manifests as sore feet and catty infighting, but it makes for some surprising moments down the line, including one bit of minor torture that ends up playing for laughs when the European brute realises that he’s picking on the one group for whom losing toenails is a pretty everyday occurrence. All the goons predictably assume that the girls are weak and vulnerable on account of their slightness, but constantly underestimate their capacity for soaking up serious punishment, and ultimately working as an improvisational team to take the fight back to their attackers with box-cutters embedded in their pointe shoes and broken bottles and hammers in each hand.
This is why that big action set-piece really works. It isn’t just a case of being nattily constructed – although it definitely is – but that it’s the big coming together moment when the girls realise they’re not defenceless. It’s the crispest embodiment of the movie’s underlying themes and ideas. I’d argue that it’s worth sitting through the whole thing to see it, since the 88-minute runtime isn’t too egregious, but it does mean wading through a lot of mediocrity on either side.
