Last year’s Ballerina, or as Lionsgate’s marketing team would prefer us to say From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, failed as both proof that the Keanu Reeves-led franchise could support expansion and that “ballet action thriller” could be a worthy new genre. The title, in whichever format audiences came across it, was both confusing and misleading, the film ultimately featuring very little in the way of actual dance moves.
For those who left the cinema enraged at Ana de Armas’s lack of arabesque kills, they can get their fill at home this week with Amazon’s fresh-from-SXSW actioner Pretty Lethal, a film all about ballet dancers actually using their skills to slaughter a string of eastern European bad guys. It’s a neat idea, positioning women who might be untrained fighters but who have grit and stamina learned from a gruelling form of dance many underestimate, and in an overcrowded field, it gives it a slight yet elegantly extended, leg up.
The young women are American dancers en route to a competition in Budapest when their bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere (it’s a rare example of an American genre film shot in eastern Europe that’s also actually set there too). It’s a group of somewhat familiar faces – To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Lana Condor, reality star turned Sia muse turned West Side Story player Maddie Ziegler, A Quiet Place’s Millicent Simmonds, Judd Apatow’s daughter Iris and Mean Girls remake star Avantika – who encounter a one-time A-lister in the woods. Taking on a version of the role Anjelica Huston played in Ballerina (dodgy accent with an order of extra ham), Uma Thurman is Devora, the owner of a remote inn, a one-time dancer who now operates a criminal enterprise.
In a turn of events that resembles a less eye-openingly gory and markedly less effective riff on Jeremy Saulnier’s fantastically thrilling Green Room, the girls witness the true nature of Devora’s operation and are stuck with bloodthirsty goons standing between them and freedom.
With a runtime of less than 90 minutes, British director Vicky Jewson keeps things dancing along nice and fast even if it means that Kate Freund’s economical script can feel at times a little too basic. The ballerinas are not given much in the way of differentiating characteristics (rich one, poorer one, Christian one, sisters ones) and the use of the boringly overdone character-takes-drugs-without-realising cliche makes one pray it’s soon retired but Jewson has fun throwing her characters into sub-John Wick sequences, finding ways to make use of what they lack and what they’re able to transfer from their skillset. It does mean that when facing off against multiple henchmen at once, a heavy suspension of disbelief is necessary (there are a lot of hardened burly men who are dizzy and flailing in the background) but there’s a real earned tenacity to the dancers that keeps us involved and on side.
It sounds like the set-up for a post-Home Alone kids movie but Jewson employs enough slicing, stabbing and severing to remind us we are very much in R-rated territory and it gives the film an added burst of energy (ballet pumps transformed into shivs deliver many satisfying blows). The young actors might not get a huge amount to say or do but they’re all game and make for convincing learned-on-the-job fighters while Condor’s knack for comedy nudges her to standout status. As the big bad, Thurman is hammy enough for one to want just that bit more to edge it into full scenery-devouring camp, especially as she re-embraces her ballet roots in the finale. It’s the kind of over-the-cliff villain role one could imagine Parker Posey destroying but I was left wanting almost as if Thurman decided to take it all more seriously than it deserved.
Nothing here is to be taken very seriously at all but it is mostly devoid of the suffocating, and often nihilistic, smugness one has come to expect from modern action films, especially those which premiere at SXSW (here it all matters just about as much as it should). The Pretty Lethal dancers might not be rivalling John Wick anytime soon but they could take down his Ballerina quite easily.
Pretty Lethal is now available on Amazon Prime
