Flasz On Film

“Mom, can we buy Ballerina?” Billy, a hypothetical tween, bleats in the general direction of his primary caregiver while trapped between Blu-Ray shelves at their local HMV (or Barnes & Noble, take your pick based on your geographical circumstances).

“We have Ballerina at home” he hears back from his clearly exasperated mother already orienting her body towards the exit. “It’s on Prime, actually. I saw it in the ad roll. We’re already paying for this so I’m not buying it twice.”

Little did Billy know that the Ballerina his mother thought they had at home was in fact Pretty Lethal.

That is a narrative expansion of a rather visual meme review of this movie whose punchline is that Pretty Lethal is Ballerina you have at home that might already exist somewhere on Letterboxd, adorned by thousands of likes. The problem is, though, that (1) the hypothetical Billy is unlikely to be found inside a store surrounded by physical media and (2) he actually has both movies at home, assuming his parents have subscribed to more than one streaming service (and the likelihood of that happening is rather high). Pretty Lethal is available globally on Prime as Amazon MGM picked up its international distribution after the premiere at SXSW Festival, while Ballerina, depending on jurisdiction, can be found on HBO Max or on Amazon Prime as well. So this whole little joke doesn’t stand up to scrutiny one bit and falls apart like a house of cards the minute you start prodding at its logic with a stick.

However, it doesn’t change the take-home lesson that Pretty Lethal, while available to watch at home, is a movie you will regret committing ninety minutes of your life to watching. It is stupidly bad and is best avoided at all cost, regardless of how enticing that ad roll on your smart TV or other device might look like. Believe me, this isn’t worth your time even if the premise does vaguely suggest some camp so-bad-it’s good vibes.

In a nutshell, Pretty Lethal tells a story of a dysfunctional team of ballerinas who venture out to Budapest for an international dance competition, but end up stranded in the middle of nowhere in Hungary after their plane is rerouted and the bus taking them to their destination breaks down in the woods. They seek shelter in a hostel-cum-club-cum-brothel-cum-hideout where they are detained against their will by baddies in leather jackets. So, they have to resolve their differences and literally dance their way to freedom while kicking, punching, slicing and dicing their many opponents.

In an even smaller nutshell, imagine a canonical slasher premise, a cast of final girls most of whom actually survive the ordeal (because modern audiences like happy endings, I suppose), a redundancy of nameless henchmen (that’s right; I believe the collective noun for henchmen should be “a redundancy”) and Uma Thurman playing a final boss of the movie—a one-legged ex-ballerina with a penchant for solving her problems with torture and mutilation—and you’d be close. Pretty Lethal is a low-calorie hybrid descendant of Hostel and Euro Trip and an adherent to the slasher tradition that also might have been informed by the aesthetic of post-John Wick action thrillers. And this is a movie you will watch with your head in your hands because for all its posturing, there’s very little fun to be extracted from watching what unfolds in here at all.

First of all, you have to get over the utterly standard dysfunctional dynamic between the cast members. There’s the underdog, the pretty entitled one, two sisters slightly to the side and the one you’d forget she was even there to begin with. There’s also a teacher who bites it relatively early on so any suggestion of logic creeping into what the blister of ballerinas (again, I insist that the collective noun for ballerinas should be “a blister”) would do to secure their freedom could be tossed out the window. Therefore, they apply their dancing skills, stick blades into their pointe shoes and slice through people’s necks and work out their character differences while maiming and killing. Which should register as fun but it does not.

I’m not here to chastise terrible writing on display or the visual aesthetic slavishly devoted to those post-Stahelski vibes. I’m not even opposed to truly broad stereotypes used to characterize literally everyone on the screen. Our protagonist ballerinas are defined by single-word traits, the big boss is defined by her pirate leg, and henchmen are defined by their leather jackets and thick accents. In fact, the whole concept of localizing the story in Hungarian backwoods is painted over with incredibly broad strokes. Locals are either leather-clad criminals driving twenty-year-old G-wagons or gross and obese men who either display their buttcracks peeking out of their barely hanging on trousers or their navels nipping out from under their tighter-than-needed stained polo shirts, depending on where the camera is positioned. They all speak English with generic Slavic accent and look as though someone had pissed in their cornflakes in the morning.

That’s the kind of movie you’re in. Pretty Lethal is assembled from nothing more than the most crass and unoriginal stereotypical characterizations and its action is executed with flair whose range doesn’t venture far beyond the application of handheld camera work. And it would have been fine if the movie itself wanted to have fun with the material. But it doesn’t. Nothing of note happens in the story, the filmmaker (Vicky Jewson, who has previously directed Close, a direct-to-Netflix action thriller starring Noomi Rapace) refuses to unnerve or discomfort the audience by even slightly committing to the kinds of customs you’d typically encounter in movies of this provenance, and it all wraps up neatly under ninety minutes having delivered next-to-zero thrills or chills. And this is a problem because while I personally do not object to watching stupid movies about stupid people doing stupid things and having stupid things done to them in stupid ways, I want to get something out of it. Base entertainment. Camp chills. A visceral experience rooted in practical effects, gore and violence. A subversion of anything. Even an acknowledgement that the people involved had fun making the movie they asked me to watch. But all I got was a feeling that I wasted my time.

So, what can I say? Watch Pretty Lethal at your own peril and doing so most likely won’t cost you a dime. But time is money so you might as well spend it elsewhere because Pretty Lethal is quite honestly pretty forgettable. And, to dispel that flawed meme review, it is not Ballerina you have at home. Ballerina is a mess of a different variety. It is more appropriate to see it as that diet Hostel with dancers in it and absolutely no edge or indulgence to be found. I’m telling you—skip it.