Pretty Lethal, 2026.
Directed by Vicky Jewson.
Starring Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Millicent Simmonds, Maddie Ziegler, Avantika, Uma Thurman, Michael Culkin, Adam Boncz, Balázs Megyeri, Gary Cothenet, Krisztián Csákvári, Shahaub Roudbari, Miklós Béres, Gábor Nagypál, Julian Krenn, Tamás Szabó Sipos, Péter Végh, and Klára Spilák.
SYNOPSIS:
It follows a group of ballerinas as they try to escape from a remote inn after their bus breaks down on the way to a dance competition.
Forget that director Vicky Jewson and screenwriter Kate Freund’s ballerinas-vs-mobsters disposable streaming flick Pretty Lethal is failing at twirling by on the slimmest of narratives (it is a miracle that the running time even reaches 88 minutes); they can’t even settle on a consistent tone during the fight scenes. Within seconds, the film often goes from a grounded sense of danger in that these men cruelly mean business and can toss these nimble but agile women around like rag dolls, to something farcical that defies logic and physics with the dancing coming into play, often times with blades or other sharp objects going through similar rhythms.
There isn’t one of the usual reveals that we are watching characters with a secret past or hidden talents for violence, it’s just a movie that can’t decide if ballerina based attacks are no match for Hungarian mobsters (a silly concept I’m all for) or if this is a situation of real threat, especially considering one of the leaders of this establishment shoots their instructor point blank in the face 20 minutes into the proceedings.
That there isn’t a semblance of a plot beyond a dysfunctional dance troupe inadvertently finds themselves in trouble when their tour bus breaks down and receive help from shady individuals bringing them to their hangout spot who, as you already know from reading this, turn out to be mobsters, and must start working together if they’re going to survive, doesn’t help these jarring distractions in hand-to-hand battles that, if nothing else, contain the occasional bit of impressive manoeuvrability and physicality along with a clever stroke of violence (even that is frustratingly limited).
This might sound nitpicky to an outsider who hasn’t seen a single scene play out, but rest assured, the action doesn’t even make sense in terms of the characters. Played by an ensemble including Lana Condor, Maddie Ziegler, Avantika, Iris Apatow, and the only semi-interesting one of the bunch, A Quiet Place‘s deaf-mute revelation Millicent Simmonds, who is then disappointingly not given much of anything interesting to do (she heads to the bathroom before the mobsters get violent, for unclear reasons, where she meets a young man her age along the way and instantly becomes smitten as they goof around unaware of what’s happening around them), the ballerinas are personified as mean girls ditzy (none of these jokes land), cutesy, or rejecting the artform, yet can suddenly turn dancing into a superpower whether they are working together or not.
When it’s their turn to start taking punches and other blows back, it is excessively brutal for whatever this movie is going for, and it consistently feels as if these filmmakers have no idea what they want to do with the action they have conceptualized. Protagonists take a beating back all the time; that’s not the gripe here. It is done in a manner that muddies what type of action movie this is supposed to be. If, at one point, this was something darker and more of an attempt at a thriller before going through rewrites that ungracefully smoothed aspects over into action that takes too long to get nutty enough to work, that would explain a lot. Nothing can explain how flimsy and bare-bones the narrative is.
Regarding the villains, adjacent to the mobsters is Uma Thurman’s former dancer, Devora Kasimer, bad accent and all, who sees an opportunity to leverage the monsters’ screw-up to get out of a dicey situation of her own. Again, little of this matters or even makes sense, with Devora’s motives not coming into play until the final 15 minutes. At the very least, Pretty Lethal builds to an amusing and somewhat skillfully choreographed all-out brawl between the now-united ballerinas and the mobsters, set to a classical piece of music; it’s the type of sequence that functions more successfully as absurd, with more fitting flourishes of vulnerability and a sense of character through action. The rest is stuck somewhere in the middle, not ridiculous enough or too serious for its own good.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
