'Pretty Lethal' Prime Video Review: Like Watching An Amateur Try To Plie

In a world where the ballet community has been supremely offended by an Oscar-nominated actor, instead of artists celebrating artists, we get meme after meme that still might not give us respite from the damage already done. Somehow, days after this debacle, I get to witness these two worlds of cinema and ballet collide in a ballerina thriller about 5 gorgeous young women who get caught up in a mess when they head off to Budapest to perform at the most prestigious ballet showcase. By the sounds of it, Pretty Lethal is something I’d eat up in seconds, like this is the exact kind of film I want to grab my friends to watch, but this film, sigh, is the most disappointing thing I’ve seen this year. Maybe this is because of the high expectations I set for it, specifically seeing these young ladies, whom I’ve adored ever since they started out in the industry. We’re getting two completely female-led films, both in the horror/thriller genre, in the same week, and it happens to be the week going into spring. What more can one ask for? Well, my only ask is that the other film I’m talking about doesn’t disappoint as much. 

Before I get into the negatives, though, I’d like to start with some good stuff about the film. For one, the most entertaining bits are the ballet ones. It does look like everyone, apart from Maddie Ziegler, who we already know is a trained ballet dancer, has put in at least some work to look like they can pull off a perfect developpé, and that, in my opinion, is already something to applaud. In a film that’s about ballet dancers, we get a good amount of ballerina badassery, specifically when the action begins, but I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that. The other thing is this cast, which, honestly, is a great choice, and they have lovely chemistry, even with Uma Thurman, who looks almost unlike herself in this film. I can’t deny that this film has a good concept at its core; that’s what got me so interested. It’s made by women, clearly for women, but I think somewhere along the way, it ended up becoming a bit too focused on being different, to the point that it lost out on just being good. 

The film tries really hard not to be trope-y, like the Brown girl, played by the gorgeous Avantika (though the character reminded me a lot of her version of Karen in Mean Girls), is called Grace and is obsessed with Jesus, whereas Lana Condor’s character, who is called Princess, takes a page out of London Tipton’s book and is a rich brat, minus the smart part, I guess. There’s a deaf ballet dancer, portrayed by A Quiet Place’s Millicent Simmonds, and she’s just a delight to watch. Iris Apatow plays her older sister, and they really make it seem like they’re sisters. Finally, there’s Maddie, who gives off main-character energy. She is what you’d call the scholarship student of the group. She’s called Bones, and is the “poor” student who knows for sure ballet is not meant for her, because it’s for rich brats like Princess. Bones and Princess are rivals for obvious reasons, but I guess it’s a simple plot device, rather than something to go deeper into. And that’s just how I felt about everything in Pretty Lethal. We don’t really get any genuine character development; it’s all quite superficial. Sure, some things change; there is some kind of growth, but it’s the kind of thing even a 10-year-old could come up with. Still, if you’d like to see some ballerinas kick some ass, you can do some second-screen viewing with this one. But that’s all it really is; there’s nothing you need to pay attention to, there’s no spooky cult or great secret, and it’s all too literal and simple, even the action choreography. 

I think if the villains were even remotely interesting or had any depth to them, the film could have been a lot more interesting. Sadly, what we get for the most part are bargain basement generic Eastern European gangsters; for a while, it seems like they’re actually going to speak Hungarian amongst themselves, but then almost all the Hungarian characters end up speaking to each other in English, even if there are no Americans around. They’re blond, sleekly dressed, and fail to be menacing, even when they’re doing horrifying stuff on screen. Uma Thurman is criminally underused, given a character whose backstory is as thin as wet paper towels and almost seems to go back and forth a few times over the course of the film.

An interesting parallel to draw here is with the 2015 film The Green Room, though the premise is fairly different there. The Green Room (released just over a decade ago, yikes) and Pretty Lethal do have in common that they’re about a band of performers who don’t think of themselves as fighters, who find themselves trapped and surrounded by an oppressive gang led by a charismatic monster, and the police aren’t coming to help. Patrick Stewart’s Darcy is genuinely menacing even while being polite; he always looks like he knows what he’s doing, and that makes him so much scarier. While Pretty Lethal is written as more of a playful comedy, the tone is already dissonant enough that an actually scary Uma Thurman could have been just the thing to elevate the film. You already know she’s talented enough, so it’s a shame how her character doesn’t do her justice. 

Speaking of the comedy, it’s mostly slapstick, but even if that’s your jam, it’s not necessarily executed very well here. Some of the fight scenes are pretty impressive, and the way that ballet is integrated into them is quite fun, but with the bad guys being shown as bumbling fools, you never have any reason to feel scared for the leads. Ultimately, if you decided to watch Pretty Lethal because you wanted a thriller, you’re not really going to get one, though there is a bit of gore. If you came looking for a movie where ballerinas get to be badass and beat people up, you do get that, but it’s not very subtle about it. At the end of the day, I was here for the girls, and they delivered as best as they could with this paper-thin script. Really, if this were made for the cinemas, it might’ve been done better, but unfortunately, it’s going straight to streaming, so they didn’t bother. I give Pretty Lethal 2.5 out of 5 stars. The .5 is simply for the girls (mainly Avantika, because I’ve seen her grow beautifully for the South Asian community).