I love ballet. Not, like DOING ballet, but much like figure skating, dance is a fascinating discipline that combines athleticism and artistry to tell soap opera level stories with such furious passion that has no true equal. Dancers devote their lives to a challenging, high art form bound to break their hearts (and bodies). It's tragic and beautiful.
Hence, anytime a genre (or in this case, adjacent) film crosses my eyes with a pirouette, I'm in.
Quick Plot: Miss Thorna's small ballet troupe is heading to Budapest for an important gala performance, but their bus isn't quite up for the trip. It breaks down somewhere in the Hungarian woods, leaving the girls to hike their way to the nearest glimpse of civilization: a rundown hotel stacked with eastern European gangsters under the watch of former prima donna Devora.
Enough small bad decisions are made that things go very wrong very quickly. Miss Thorna witnesses something she shouldn't and pays for it with an immediate bullet to the head. With no phone service or record of their tracks, her dancers are seemingly lambs to the slaughter.
Never discount someone who can do fouettés on the very tips of her toes.
As defacto leader Bones points out, these girls may be outmanned and on strange turf, but their enemies are drunk and out of shape. The dancers, on the other hand, are prima FUCKING ballerinas. No, they're not trained to disarm gangsters or even fire guns (well, never discount a country club girl), but they ARE physical Amazons with skills John Wick could only dream about.
Directed by Vicky Jewson from a sharp script by Kate Freund, Pretty Lethal is pretty damn fun. Maddie Ziegler confidently leads the action and bounces especially well off rich girl Princess (Lana Condor). The film seamlessly includes a deaf character (A Quiet Place's Millicent Simmonds) without ever feeling like a forced decision. At under 90 minutes, there's little time for backstories but honestly? It doesn't matter. The actresses all put enough into their characters and Freund's script gives us all we need in their interactions to know who they are.
Best of all, there's nothing cruel about Pretty Lethal. Another filmmaker could easily have taken the material and made it leering or unpleasant. Beautiful young women battling for their lives against male gangsters can go very, very wrong. In Jewson's hands, we have full confidence that these women will be able to take care of themselves.
High Points
Yes, we get fight choreography that combines ballet and basic bar brawls, and yes, it's fabulous.
Low Points
I know that Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite is a) the most recognizable ballet for Americans and b) public domain and therefore convenient to drop into your soundtrack, but the actual ballet-ness of Pretty Lethal feels a bit stifled by being restricted to this as its only real source of music
Lessons Learned
You can tell a well-traveled ballerina by whether she knows the difference between ebola and e-coli
Toenail torture does not work on ballerinas
Hungarian gangsters shoot as well as Empire stormtroopers
Nobody commits to an accent quite like Uma Thurman
Rent/Bury/Buy
Pretty Lethal was kind of made for me, so it's hard to know if its appeal is quite as universal. But hey, if you like ballet mixed with hand to hand combat and sprinkled on top with Uma Thurman in full camp, you can't really go wrong. Find if on Amazon.
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