When I arrived at college to study film, my apartment was down the hall from other artists, including actors, painters, and dancers. As the semester progressed, I quickly learned one truth: ballerinas are insane.
Yes, everyone works hard at their craft, but go and check out some ballet training sessions, and you'll come out with a very different view of the delicate performances on stage. While it feels obvious to point out how much work goes into anything this physical, the truth still took me by surprise.
That underappreciated notion works as the backbone for Pretty Lethal, a delightfully silly action thriller where a group of ballerinas must escape the depths of a Russian mob hotel. No matter what is thrown their way, the girls shrug it off with surprising endurance. After all, it's nowhere near as bad as a recital.
If you can get on board with that, you'll have a blast with the film. Yes, our heroes are light in character, and even Uma Thurman, who has a blast as the villainous owner of the establishment, can't do much with the little she's given. But there's something to be said about the power of fun, and that's what Pretty Lethal delivers in spades. I understand why these characters do what they do, even if I can barely remember their names.
It helps that director Vicky Jewson keeps things at such a brisk pace that there's never really an opportunity to ask 'why'. Instead, by the time you start to question anything, someone gets kicked in the face with a boxcutter. In one bravura sequence, our heroes dispatch a pack of goons to the tune of the Nutcracker, and it's as devilishly fun as it sounds.
The cast is equally impressive, especially the de facto leading pair of Lana Condor as Princess and Maddie Ziegler as Bones. Their parts are the most rounded, but Condor and Ziegler also bring immense physical humor to the mix.
Watch, for example, how superbly Condor plays the moment where she has to smooth-talk a gargantuan thug while masking the abject terror of what she's witnessed just seconds earlier. It's a tremendous balancing act of funny and fear, which is never as easy as it sounds.
At just under 90 minutes in length, Pretty Lethal is exactly as long as it needs to be. My only issues with it are a couple of odd tonal shifts, which push the film into darker territory than I think is necessary. I get why these scenes are there, but they still grind against the rest of the film, which is surprisingly bubbly even as the body count piles up.
But if that's the only complaint, then what a minor one it is. Few movies know so precisely what they are, and even fewer deliver on their high-concept promise with such accuracy. Pretty Lethal is everything it says on the cover, and what a joy that is.
