Pretty Lethal debuts on Amazon Prime Video on March 25.
There is certainly a fun, goofy idea at the center of Pretty Lethal, with its core concept of a ballet troupe needing to fight back against a brutal group of bad guys and incorporating their dance training in the process. And sometimes the movie itself is indeed fun…just not as much as it could be.
Directed by Vicky Jewson (Close), Pretty Lethal begins with a setup that feels straight out of a horror movie, as the bus taking a group of young American ballerinas to a competition in Budapest breaks down on a remote Hungarian road and the girls seek refuge in a dilapidated hotel. But what they find inside isn’t vampires, werewolves, or crazed cannibals, but rather a group of local criminals under the command of Devora (Uma Thurman).
Our five ballerinas are played by a likeable group of young actresses who are all familiar from projects in recent years, including Lana Condor (To All the Boys), Iris Apatow (The Bubble), Millicent Simmonds (A Quiet Place), and Avantika (Mean Girls). But the film’s lead is Maddie Ziegler as an amusingly edgy ballerina, and you know she’s edgy because of her septum piercing and the fact that she goes by the name Bones.
As an actress, Ziegler is decent, although she can feel a bit more stilted than her costars in the early scenes. But anyone familiar with her background knows her lifelong immense talent lies in dance, having risen to fame as a child on the reality series Dance Moms before breaking out in a different realm as Sia’s avatar in a number of popular music videos. Among a cast playing highly trained dancers, Ziegler is the real deal, so it’s no surprise she’s given the most physical role, and she excels in this regard.
It’s not a new observation to equate the intricacies of action movie choreography with dance choreography, but Pretty Lethal does have some scenes that definitely deliver on blending these two disciplines. The film is produced by the stunt-driven 87North Productions, whose shtick is often “person you wouldn’t expect to be a badass fighter is a badass fighter,” including a suburban dad (Nobody), Santa Claus himself (Violent Night), and a suburban non-dad (Love Hurts). Ziegler is a great person to play the lead in the ballerina version of this template since she’s so skilled already when it comes to the spins, twirls, and incredibly high kicks her character will use to fight and kill her enemies, and you can see it’s actually her doing so many of these moves in-camera. It’s also worth remembering that Michelle Yeoh came from a dance background too, not a martial arts background; Ziegler could definitely have a future in action movies, and probably end up wearing a superhero or supervillain suit in the process.
But even with an 88-minute run time, Pretty Lethal gets off to a notably sluggish start, taking surprisingly long to get to the promised mayhem. The chemistry between the cast helps to hold things up to some extent, with Avantika and Condor both providing a lot of natural humor and screenwriter Kate Freund offering some solid one-liners and a few (appreciated) purposely bad puns. But the very thin story and characters demand to be supplemented by more action – the reason for the movie’s existence, to be fair – and so it’s frustrating to have the build-up be so slow.
The film’s best action set piece is its first major one, occurring about halfway through, as the girls – having fully realized their own lives are in danger – first band together to fight back in humorously balletic and sometimes bloody ways. It is sublimely silly and exciting when Ziegler’s Bones uses a razor blade stuck in the front of her ballet shoe as a lethal instrument, and most of the other characters are given their own crowd-pleasing moment as well.
After that, Pretty Lethal’s second half is the stronger to be sure, featuring a few other action highlights. Thurman is also predictably enjoyable going big as the main villain who – of course – turns out to have once been a ballerina herself. But it never is able to maintain the momentum it’s trying for, only coming alive in fits and starts, while the film’s action climax is followed by a denouement that falls flat, missing out on the more enticing appeal of blending together these two sequences in a way that could have been a lot more fun.
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