A group of American dancers face off against Hungarian gangsters, and a hammy Uma Thurman, in a cheap and cheerful Friday night adventure
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ast 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.
