Michael Fairbanks
Somewhere along the way, Hollywood became privy to the backstory of Marvel’s Black Widow, and we have been paying the price ever since. Red Sparrow. From The World of John Wick: Ballerina. Ballerina Assassin. A group of boilerplate knock-offs that will soon be joined by Pretty Lethal, the latest and possibly worst installment in the ‘ballerina who does lethal martial arts’ canon. It has a novel spin on the concept. A group of regular dancers who have not been hardened by battle yet are forced to fight to free themselves. Sadly, director Vicky Jewson executes it in the most milquetoast, MGM/Amazon Prime Video-ready package possible. She may get lucky. Ballerinas are having a bit of a moment. People are more willing to defend and champion them than ever before. If my South By Southwest Film Festival crowd is to be trusted, folks will be uproariously screaming in their living rooms whenever any ballet move is struck and applauding whenever the art form is praised in a heavy-handed way. I have my doubts.
Pretty Lethal throws us into the lives of an ensemble of LA-based dancers who have their eyes on a competition in Europe. We have two divas clashing. Bones (Maddie Ziegler) is fed up with the more prissy but outgoing Princess (Lana Candor), who has parental ties to their troupe. Zoe (Iris Apatow), Grace (Avantika) and Chloe (Millicent Simmonds) are also there, mostly standing around waiting for something to say in these early goings. When the group arrives, their bus breaks down in the middle of the road. Seeking help, they make their way to a swanky compound and find themselves in the middle of Eastern European gangster drama. After meeting Devora (an utterly wasted Uma Thurman), who seems to run things, their instructor is casually gunned down in the middle of the club. Hoping to contain the situation, the gangsters capture the troupe, and they must band together to be free.
These girls spend so much of Pretty Lethal going through the motions of being held captive. All of them are charismatic, but as they lie around discussing what to do next, there is very little room for character-driven banter. It is a classic case of streaming movie pacing. Since it has to be legible to someone on their phone, the storyline has to be able to be followed entirely through audio. It is like listening to a slightly annoying group of people figure out an escape room. Meanwhile, we also get plenty of the gangsters discussing what their next moves are going to be. All of this would’ve been easy to stomach if these characters were funny, but they so utterly lack personality that at times it is genuinely difficult to keep them all straight.
The back half of Pretty Lethal is slightly more exciting. There are two allotted action set pieces. The first is a standout. The girls finally start to break free and are forced into a brutal brawl with a handful of goons. Throughout the tussle, they slowly discover how their dancing skills and gear can be used to turn the tide. It’s an extremely satisfying bit of visual storytelling in a film that has had absolutely none up until then. Since none of these actors are professional fighters, the choreography isn’t mind-blowing, but the 87 North team is ever reliable at making these types of scenes hurt. Then there is the climactic battle that involves the troupe forming a triumphant girlboss circle to attack more goons with their choreography. While they float around and charge up their moves, the goons stand there and watch patiently before they are cued to run into the fray. They’re cut down by more complete dance moves that are even occasionally captured in floaty slow motion shots to convey that the angelically timed high leg kick with a protruding heel *really* hurt. It’s cheesy. Full of one-liners that could go on a tote bag. Far too neatly packaged to let the rage and athleticism it is trying to convey come out in any truly visceral way.
Call me Timothée Chalamet because I think that assembly line action programmers for women need to abandon ballet and find a new gimmick. Give women their Mechanic or Beekeeper. Even so, Pretty Lethal would’ve worked if it had a screenplay that created iconic characters. It is well cast, but actors become irrelevant when a film has to meet Amazon Prime’s formal specs. Pretty Lethal should’ve been in constant motion to mirror the physical rigor of dancers. The kind of movie that is exhausting to watch when imagining how any given action shot was captured. Jeff Bezos doesn’t want that movie, and he never will. It somehow left me pitifully yearning for Gunpowder Milkshake. Those who despise the action genre but decide to sample Pretty Lethal might get a kick out of it. Everybody else should sashay away.
