Perhaps Timothée Chalamet might appreciate ballet more if the dancers strapped X-Acto knives to their shoes and sliced assailants’ necks with every spin. That’s one of many ensanguined standout moments that await in director Vicky Jewson’s “Pretty Lethal.”
It never expands beyond its elevator pitch of “ballerinas use their years of training to fight off their captors in Hungary,” and for many, that might just be enough to satiate. Produced by 87North Productions — the company behind the “Nobody” films and “Bullet Train” — the choreography is expectedly graceful and thrilling. It’s the elements in between the carnage, from underdeveloped characters to a confusing plot, that could have used a few more practice sessions to refine. There’s more here if you’re willing to give it your full attention, even though for the Prime Video crowd — where this gets unceremoniously dumped — it will probably become nothing more than a passable diversion. To its credit, though, this is a film propelled by its own style that refuses to be relegated to second-screen content.
With a film like this, Jewson knows why you’ve come, and she’s in sync with Kate Freund’s economical script, which wastes little time getting to its claustrophobic premise. A ballet troupe consisting of Zoe (Iris Apatow), Princess (Lana Condor), Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), Grace (Avantika), and Bones (Maddie Ziegler) travels to Hungary with their coach, Miss Thorne (Lydia Leonard). Earlier, we see them in the throes of their routines and witness firsthand how the interpersonal conflicts among them manifest in a messy performance.
They’re all wrestling with their own demons and crave the spotlight for themselves, even if it comes at the cost of the group’s cohesion. The most pointed tension is between Princess, whose parents are generous supporters of the ballet program, and Bones, who doesn’t come from money; both are competing for a coveted solo spot in the routine. “Ballet is a rich bitch sport,” Bones says to Miss Thorne, after she punches an annoying Princess following a rehearsal. “You do not work well together,” Miss Thorne says pointedly; you can probably guess what the main narrative arc and theme of the film will be.
The bus to their competition breaks down, and the girls and Miss Thorne go on foot to a nearby bar called the Teremok Inn, overseen by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman). If the notable paucity of women and the overbearing presence of grumpy, antagonistic men weren’t a giveaway that something was awry, the subtext of male aggression becomes text when a patron murders Miss Thorne after she rebuffs his advances. The girls, who witness the crime, find themselves swarmed by patrons trying to silence them from sharing the truth.
At the end of the day, you come to a movie like “Pretty Lethal” for its action, and while 87North Productions are masters at mining the brutality that can come when everyday objects are placed in the hands of desperate people, there’s so little narrative and character development to chew on that the dissonance between the thoughtfulness put into the action and the lack thereof in the characters is noticeable.
Ziegler makes the biggest impression, her natural inclination for distrust manifesting as the savviness required to make her the leader of the troupe. The other girls are defined by easy-to-recognize character traits, allowing you to telegraph how their arcs might resolve by the film’s end. We don’t really get to know them, and we become trained to only care about the ways they contort and bend their bodies in fight sequences, which feels slightly incongruent with the story’s attempt to make us care about them as people. But when the girls switch from being the hunted to the hunters, the film finally finds its groove.
A standout sequence that takes place in a cramped basement between four of the girls and two of the assailants is the film’s highlight, because the action is in dialogue with the interiority of the characters and vice versa. The girls must forget the instincts of their training and redeploy their skills in grisly, inventive ways, and it’s cathartic when they realize they are the ones who hold the power in the situation. They’ve mastered how to move in tight spaces compared to the villains assaulting them, and it’s thrilling to see them discover their power in real time, their curiosity about how they can use their moves yielding bloody results. The fight scenes become less impressive as the action expands, and the combat starts to feel less believable, even if it grows more extravagant.
Weighing it down a bit more are the “please clap” film moments that feel practically orchestrated to exorcise adulation from the audience. “We’re balle-fucking-rinas,” Bones says—a war cry meant to elicit a reaction but coming off as a cloying attempt at goodwill for a film that already has it in spades.
Even with these eye-rolling moments, there’s a righteous reclamation in the images we see here. Jewson and cinematographer Bridger Nielson understand that the contours of how we dream are defined by the images we’re inundated with. How many action movies have glorified guns, biceps, and male chauvinism just for the sake of having a good time? That Jewson instead focuses her camera on white tutus and worn shoes feels like a redemption of a female-minded perspective in the action film space. It leaves you not just satisfied but curious about the possibilities of other vocations and how their practices can be remixed into brutal delights.
“Pretty Lethal” streams March 25 exclusively on Amazon Prime.
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