‘Pretty Lethal’ Review: Uma Thurman in Lazy Amazon Ballet Thriller

If nothing else, Pretty Lethal — the latest blood-drenched and neon-lit endeavor from 87North, the outfit behind (promisingly) The Fall Guy and (less promisingly) Love Hurts — contains one truly spectacular sequence.

It comes in the third act, when a quintet of young ballerinas find themselves trapped in a hotel lobby, surrounded by deadly Hungarian gangsters on all sides. With nowhere to run, the girls rally the only way they know how: by launching into their dance routine. Moving in well-practiced harmony, they turn pirouettes into kicks and jetés into body slams, brandishing hammers and broken bottles and whatever else they can grab.

It’s a scene so mesmerizing you suspect it’s why this whole movie exists in the first place, to serve as a delivery mechanism for these few minutes of John Wick-meets-The Nutcracker choreography. Because otherwise, the impression Pretty Lethal leaves behind is one of unfulfilled potential, an exciting premise executed as a fitfully fun but mostly forgettable distraction.

Its biggest star is Uma Thurman, which is not to say she’s the most central. She plays Devora, the icy proprietress of an ancient-looking inn that seems to cater exclusively to her tiny village’s surprisingly robust population of gangsters. Devora happens to have been a dancer in her youth, though that fact is less relevant than you’d expect, aside from giving production designer Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner an excuse to fill the set with thematic props. (A ceiling hung with dozens of toe shoes is a particularly cool-yet-cuckoo touch.) Mostly, what Devora does is stalk around in the margins and bark orders in a thick Hungarian accent. Frankly, it’s a waste of the Kill Bill star.

It is into Devora’s place that a troupe of dancers stumble one night, seeking shelter from a storm after their bus breaks down en route to Budapest. Initially, the Americans — scrappy Bones (Maddie Ziegler), ditzy Grace (Avantika), boy-crazy Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), her protective sister Zoe (Iris Apatow) and spoiled Princess (Lana Condor, who seems to be in a different and much funnier movie) — are just relieved to be dry, if a bit creeped out by the place’s seedy vibe. But things really go south when a confrontation with Pasha (Tamás Szabó Sipos), a nepo baby who’s unhinged even by Eastern European movie mobster standards, turns nasty, and his gun-toting goons are ordered to silence them.

Naturally, these men commit the same error that all henchmen do in movies like these, mistaking these girls’ petiteness for weakness and their elegance for fragility. We, of course, know better. From the start, director Vicky Jewson emphasizes how brutal this discipline really is underneath all those fluffy tutus. Opening scenes highlight the ballerinas’ aching feet and their strong legs, but also the viciousness they’re capable of unleashing on each other. The violent enmity and eventual camaraderie between Bones and Princess is one of the film’s more rewarding subplots, comprising the closest thing to an emotional spine in a movie that otherwise seems to half-forget that characters like Chloe exist at all.

Once they’re reminded by Bones that “we are prima fucking ballerinas,” these girls discover that not only can they take more punishment than their would-be killers assume, they’re capable of doling out more hurt than these guys can see coming. In addition to their strength and agility, they also possess some of the mad creativity of the truly desperate. In one notably inspired sequence, a dancer realizes to her delight just how much damage she can unleash with a razor blade embedded into the tip of her pointe shoe.

Unfortunately, such flashes of ingenuity feel too rare, spread out among long, tedious stretches of gangster politicking that only seem to exist to justify those action scenes in the first place. At 88 minutes, Pretty Lethal can hardly be accused of overstaying its welcome, and yet too much of that run time feels like filler. Certainly I couldn’t bring myself to care much what was happening between Devora, Pasha and Pasha’s notoriously powerful dad, and I didn’t get the sense the film had much invested in their relationships either.

But oh, that climactic sequence. Once Pretty Lethal finally reaches its big showcase, it’s possible to see what this project could and should have been: a bonkers marriage of fantastical choreography and graphic brutality, classical beauty and a very modern griminess. With that bright shining number, the film simultaneously justifies all the work it took to get there — and throws into sharp relief just how drab the rest of it has been by comparison.