'Pretty Lethal' Is Pretty Bad

Prime Video’s Pretty Lethal has not an impressive cast, but an interesting one — exactly the kind that might bring in a younger audience: Maddie Ziegler (Dance Moms, that Sia movie), Lana Condor (To All the Boys), Avantika (2024’s Mean Girls), Iris Apatow (daughter of Judd, Tell Me Lies), and Millicent Simmonds (A Quiet Place). Unfortunately, the movie itself has no apparent respect for the intelligence of its younger audience — Pretty Lethal is terribly written, nonsensically plotted, and a total drag … except during the action sequences.

And it’s in those action sequences where the movie occasionally comes to life. It’s really as if someone saw Abigail and Atomic Blonde and thought, “It’d be pretty cool to make a movie about a group of badass ballerinas killing thugs.” And that part, undeniably, is cool: Who doesn’t want to see ballerinas with razor blades in their ballet slippers slashing throats? It’s just too bad that no one thought to build a better movie around the action sequences.

We have a group of ballerinas traveling through Europe for a dance competition. En route to Budapest, their van breaks down, and they seek help at a nearby mansion. Given the Eastern European location, the dim lighting, and the bad accents, one might be forgiven for thinking this was a vampire movie. It is not (although the ballerina played by Avantika ingests some drugs and briefly thinks one of the bad guys is a vampire — a flash of which is edited into the trailer to mislead viewers).

It’s not a vampire movie. Basically, Uma Thurman’s character, Devora Kasimer, is a legendary prima ballerina who runs a performance art-themed hotel where bad men also torture people. The ballet instructor encounters a vicious gangster, rejects his advances, and knees him in the groin — whereupon the gangster shoots her in the head. At this point, Devora has to have all the ballerinas killed, lest they call the authorities and shut the place down.

That’s basically the entire, muddled motive for scores of henchmen being sent to kill the ballerinas, who use their training to fend them off and violently dispatch them. It’s pretty neat. Alas, the rest of the movie is not. It is atrociously written and — save for the action sequences — poorly directed by Vicky Jewson, who extracts lousy performances out of otherwise decent actresses. Also, casting Lana Condor as the stuck-up, entitled ballerina brat doesn’t work at all — maybe Condor is trying to break free from her Lara Jean reputation, but this decidedly does not.

But mostly, it’s just a whimper of a movie that ends in painfully anticlimactic fashion (if you’re going to dress Uma Thurman up in a ballerina outfit with a peg leg, how are you not going to let her dance?). Its only saving grace is that my daughters — who wanted to watch for the YA-friendly cast — got a nice crash course in a so-bad-it’s-sometimes-good-but-still-mostly-bad movie. It is awful enough to be laughable at times, just not awful enough to be fun … except when the ballerinas deliver cringey one-liners and heel-toe thugs in the neck.

‘Pretty Lethal’ is streaming on Prime Video.