Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pretty Lethal’ on Prime Video, an Uninspired Action Romp in Which Ballerinas Become Murderinas

By John Serba

Pretty Lethal (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) banks heavily on the irony of its core premise: Young-woman ballet dancers who go from cabriole to watch-the-blood-spray after they’re held captive by ugly goons. This isn’t really a stretch, of course – fight choreography is just dance choreography with more contact (and untimely death, of course), as one of this film’s primary influences, John Wick, repeatedly illustrated. Vicky Jewson (Close) directs this should-be-funnier/should-be-more-rousing, action-heavy, brutally R-rated lark about a group of girls whose white tutus will inevitably be stained with lots of red, especially after they outfit the toes of their slippers with razor blades. A neat gimmick? Sure. But the movie doesn’t seem to have any other good ideas to go with it.

PRETTY LETHAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: This girl’s name is Bones (Maddie Ziegler). Is that on her driver’s license? Just a nickname? Are her parents big Trekkies maybe? Dunno. Why am I hung up on this? Because it’s annoying when movies name their characters after their primary traits, and so Bones is tough and shrewd where her fellow ballerinas are maybe less so. She’s the rebel of the troupe, which includes a Miss Priss Prudence Privilege named Princess (Lana Condor of the To All the Boys films), a goody-goody Bible thumper named Grace (Avantika), and two sisters, Zoe (Iris Apatow) and Chloe (Millicent Simmonds of A Quiet Place), the former tending to baby the latter because she’s deaf. 

Bones, it seems, is the only one who TRULY understands the grueling nature of the sportlike art of ballet, so she gets the hardbitten voiceover about blood, sweat and sacrifice, how dancers like her have “the blood of a warrior” and “turn pain into beauty,” etc. Read between the lines: These ladies are a hair’s breadth away from being a bunch of asswhooping Bruce Lees. Of course, their one-dimensional personalities clash on a daily basis, e.g., when snobby Princess doles out a nasty burn and Bones responds with a punch in the nose. That translates to rehearsal, when their competitive natures find them bumping and jostling when they should be doing pas de basque or whatever. Now put the five of them bickering on a bus that’s taking them on the heavily wooded scenic route to Budapest for reasons unknown – I haven’t been to Hungary, so someone out there let me know if there’s like 90 miles of dense forest between the city and the airport – and imagine how annoying that might be.

You don’t expect things to go perfectly well for them, though, right? The bus breaks down in BFE and they hoof it in the rain to the nearest building, which happens to be an old-worldish inn that’s positively teeming with rapey, heavily armed scumbags. The proprietor is a peglegged former ballerina mobster played by Uma Thurman and her unfortunate Eastern Bloc accent, which therefore makes this one of the dumbest sentences I’ve ever written. When one of her faceless goons offs the girls’ chaperone (Lydia Leonard) after she rebuffs grabby hands with a knee to the knuts, all hell breaks loose and the ballerinas have to spend the next hour or so slaughtering their way to safety. And it’s only a matter of time until they arm themselves with clawhammers and shotguns and butcher knives, and grand jete their way through a horde of panty-sniffing sleazoids. That’s whatcha get when you underestimate Gyrl Powyr.

Photo: Prime Video

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Pretty Lethal is a depressingly unoriginal melange of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina and Black Swan, with an apt homage to Kill Bill, although this Uma paycheck role is more along the lines of My Super Ex-Girlfriend.  

Performance Worth Watching: This screenplay is so uninspired, it doesn’t even give Uma any decent scenery to chew. So we’re left lamenting that Ziegler – a real ballet dancer who we first saw on reality show Dance Moms, and then in Sia music videos – and her considerable tough-girl charisma go to waste here. 

Sex And Skin: None.

Photo: ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

Our Take: Pretty Lethal is a squandered opportunity, an irony-play that looks pretty good on paper until you actually read the script and realize it needs another pass or three so nobody’s wasting the time of its up-for-roughhousing cast and a director showcasing some rock-solid visual acumen. There’s no arguing the taxing nature of dance, especially ballet; these women are athletes and artists. But that’s not enough to keep even a brisk 88-minute movie afloat – our protagonists are unmemorable quasi-caricatures, the villains are bland and faceless, the Uma subplot is tacked-on filler and the third act plays like the production ran out of money so they just blew everything up and rolled the credits.  

But but but but but razor blades in ballet slippers!!, you can almost hear the movie sputtering in protest. One inspired idea appropriated from an old James Bond outing does not a movie make. Inevitably, the film is built around a big fight sequence that comes to life in fits and starts thanks to a few of Jewson’s nifty visual flourishes, yet we’re left with the prevailing notion that this is all rather silly without being much fun. There are times when the movie thinks it’s pretty clever, but the comedy – ranging from bumblingly inept bad guys to, sigh, an inopportune drug trip – is dead on arrival. Stabs at satire barely break the skin (“We’re the Americans!” Princess blurts as she and her troupe stand bruised and battered and spattered with blood), and the battle cry, “I’m a balle-fucking-rina!” is just empty girlboss posturing. Sorry, but this movie doodoos in its tutus.

Our Call: Pretty Lethal proves that ballet is hard, but maybe making good movies is harder. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.