PRETTY LETHAL Review

We are living in the weirdest timeline: one where there is a whole cinematic universe of action movies based around ballerinas.

With two movies in the last few years simply having been called "Ballerina" (okay, I guess the John Wick spin-off had a subtitle) and being about a ballet dancer who goes on a revenge tour against those who have wronged her, you can be excused for thinking there is a lack of originality in the film world.

Amazon Prime Video decided to get in on the action recently by releasing Pretty Lethal, a 2026 action movie about a dance team of ballerinas fighting their way out of captivity against a horde of ne'er-do-wells.

Also can I ask: what's the deal with ballerinas? And why now? What got put in the water that all screenwriters seem to share that gave them all this idea? This is like when Hollywood kept releasing twin movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact. But even more specific than that.

It's a weird age.

Pretty Lethal starts off with five ballerinas--Bones, Princess, Grace, Zoe, and Chloe--and their instructor preparing for a trip to Budapest where the girls will be performing. We see their dynamics right away: Princess and Bones are the two stars who don't get along or even dance together very well. Chloe and Zoe are sisters, with Chloe (A Quiet Place'sMillicent Simmonds) being deaf. Grace rounds out the group as the religiously devout one.

Once in Europe, their bus breaks down, and the girls decide to head out on foot and try to find a place to take shelter and get a ride so they can still make it to their show in time. They quickly find their way to a nearby inn run by Uma Thurman's character, Devora.

As the girls settle in and begin relaxing, their teacher is assaulted by one of the inn's patrons. When she fights back to defend herself, her assailant pulls out a gun and shoots her dead, right in the middle of everyone.

The dancers are told that the cops will be called, and they are forced into the basement and locked up. It's shortly after that that they realize they need to fend for themselves...

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The action set pieces are fun and well shot and not too rapidly edited, making them easy to follow and enjoy. A lot of modern action goes too readily to shaky cam and quick edits, but Pretty Lethal eschews that in favor of a more steady and careful shooting style. I'm much more a fan of the latter, so I dug that.

Showing the protagonist girls fighting off hordes of villains using ballet movies all set to the tune of The Nutcracker Suite is silly, sure, but you have to remember it’s just a movie. And movies are supposed to be fun. This is a very unserious action movie, and there is as much room of those in the world as there is for any other kind of flick. 

+ Pretty Lethal is short enough to be an easy breezy watch that isn’t supposed to be too serious or time consuming. This isn’t Interstellar or anything. It's a movie about a ballet troupe taking down an army of gangsters hell-bent on killing them. There's no need to stretch that out to a hundred minutes. Sometimes movies are supposed to be an easy watch that don’t ask too much of you. 

Sure, Pretty Lethal is shrinking my average movie length for the year on Letterboxd, but for a quick Wednesday night watch with the wife, it was ideal.

- Uma Thurman spends a lot of this picture feeling out of place. She spends the majority of the film underacting everything and feeling like too much of a cold hearted bitch who doesn’t have any emotions at all. Then in her last moments, she is a little too over dramatic. It’s a pretty drastic shift that doesn’t necessarily feel fluid.

I am not sure if it’s Thurman who doesn’t work or the character’s writing. Either way, it all felt off. I was hoping there was more to her than we initially see--and there is, but the reveal isn't particularly satisfying, either. So no aspect of her really worked for me.

- It feels like there must be hundreds of ballets in the world, but all of the music used in Pretty Lethal is from The Nutcracker Suite. Which... it’s the most iconic ballet music in the world, sure, and everyone recognizes it; but you would imagine that they might have used something from, like, Black Swan or something, too. I imagine the creators behind Pretty Lethal are avid ballet fans, so it felt like they were holding back on the score front.

Pretty Lethal is a perfectly acceptable way to pass eighty or ninety minutes. If you expect your action movies to be dire and demanding, then this may not be the work for you. But if you are willing to accept the film on its own terms (I hate the phrase "turn your brain off"), there is a solid amount of fun to be had. Additionally, the actresses behind the ballerinas do mostly great work bringing their characters to life.

🍿SCORE = 51 / 100