Don’t mess with ballet dancers.
They suffer for their art, endure grueling regimens and punish their bodies to create works of art.
It’s a lesson “Pretty Lethal” takes to heart. The film follows five dancers forced to fight for their lives in a Budapest hotel. The central gimmick is a hoot, but the shopworn screenplay isn’t sure what to do with it.
And wasting the great Uma Thurman in a barely-there character is a cinematic sin.
Five scrappy ballet dancers can’t wait for the gig of their young lives – a trip to Budapest to perform at a prestigious hall. Their bus breaks down en route, but they stumble into a stranger who is more than happy to help them get to the show on time.
Or so he claims.
The women end up in an expansive Budapest hotel, where they meet a litany of unsavory characters and the inscrutable owner. That’s Devora (Thurman), a former dancer who oversees this curious joint. It’s clear she can’t be trusted despite her reassuring tone.
And then the first of many people dies, and it turns out the dancers’ ballet skills might come in handy. Yes, we’re in “John Wick” territory, with elegantly choreographed action from an unlikely source.
Young, frightened women who realize if they don’t have their backs, no one will.
For a while, the film’s flimsy plot and stale dialogue don’t matter. The action is robust, and director Vicky Jewson flashes an impressive visual sense, both in the clarity of the action and the dystopian hotel where the mayhem takes place.
Plus, the film wastes little time setting the story in motion, and the simplistic character beats don’t drag the film down.
Standout Maddie Ziegler is the group’s unofficial leader, a blue-collar dancer with a chip on her shoulder. Her frenemy (Lana Condor) is the spoiled brat of the bunch, and “A Quiet Place” alum Millicent Simmonds gets a brief romantic subplot before the tutus hit the fan.
A better film would give Thurman a lip-smacking character to play. Instead, she gets lost in a larger plot about a crime kingpin and his ne’er-do-well son (Tamás Szabó Sipos).
That storyline goes nowhere until the third act, but by then any sense of logic has long since left the building.
That’s a shame, because the female cast has good chemistry and wins our sympathies in short order. A few battle sequences are sublime without resorting to woke character tropes.
No, these slender gals aren’t duking it out with men twice their size. But if you get near them, and they insert a knife into the end of their ballet slippers, well, anything goes.
That sense of chaos spikes the film’s second act, but the screenplay decides to boost the odds against the dancers’ survival. That just makes what follows hard to believe even by B-movie terms.
Yes, the dancers in “Pretty Lethal” aren’t ready to lie down and take their punishment. Nor are they turned into Black Widow-style warriors. Still, the film’s central gimmick isn’t sustainable without a meatier script or a few clever turns of phrase.
Both, alas, are in short supply.
HiT or Miss: “Pretty Lethal” is perfect streaming fodder, the kind of action vehicle you can half-watch without missing much at all.
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