Uma Thurman in Lazy Amazon Ballet Thriller

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

It comes within the third act, when a quintet of younger ballerinas discover themselves trapped in a lodge foyer, surrounded by lethal Hungarian gangsters on all sides. With nowhere to run, the women rally the one manner they understand how: by launching into their dance routine. Moving in well-practiced concord, they flip pirouettes into kicks and jetés into physique slams, brandishing hammers and damaged bottles and no matter else they’ll seize.

It’s a scene so mesmerizing you think it’s why this entire film exists within the first place, to function a supply mechanism for these jiffy of John Wick-meets-The Nutcracker choreography. Because in any other case, the impression Pretty Lethal leaves behind is considered one of unfulfilled potential, an thrilling premise executed as a fitfully enjoyable however principally forgettable distraction.

Its largest star is Uma Thurman, which isn’t to say she’s probably the most central. She performs Devora, the icy proprietress of an ancient-looking inn that appears to cater completely to her tiny village’s surprisingly strong inhabitants of gangsters. Devora occurs to have been a dancer in her youth, although that truth is much less related than you’d anticipate, other than giving manufacturing designer Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner an excuse to fill the set with thematic props. (A ceiling hung with dozens of toe sneakers is a very cool-yet-cuckoo contact.) Mostly, what Devora does is stalk round within 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 evening, searching for shelter from a storm after their bus breaks down en path to Budapest. Initially, the Americans — scrappy Bones (Maddie Ziegler), ditzy Grace (Avantika), boy-crazy Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), her protecting sister Zoe (Iris Apatow) and spoiled Princess (Lana Condor, who appears to be in a unique and far funnier film) — are simply relieved to be dry, if a bit creeped out by the place’s seedy vibe. But issues actually go south when a confrontation with Pasha (Tamás Szabó Sipos), a nepo child who’s unhinged even by Eastern European film mobster requirements, turns nasty, and his gun-toting goons are ordered to silence them.

Naturally, these males commit the identical error that every one henchmen do in motion pictures like these, mistaking these ladies’ petiteness for weak point and their class for fragility. We, after all, know higher. From the beginning, director Vicky Jewson emphasizes how brutal this self-discipline actually is beneath all these fluffy tutus. Opening scenes spotlight the ballerinas’ aching toes and their sturdy legs, but in addition the viciousness they’re able to unleashing on one another. The violent enmity and eventual camaraderie between Bones and Princess is without doubt one of the movie’s extra rewarding subplots, comprising the closest factor to an emotional backbone in a film that in any other case appears to half-forget that characters like Chloe exist in any respect.

Once they’re reminded by Bones that “we are prima fucking ballerinas,” these ladies uncover that not solely can they take extra punishment than their would-be killers assume, they’re able to doling out extra damage than these guys can see coming. In addition to their power and agility, in addition they possess among the mad creativity of the actually determined. In one notably impressed sequence, a dancer realizes to her delight simply how a lot harm she will unleash with a razor blade embedded into the tip of her pointe shoe.

Unfortunately, such flashes of ingenuity really feel too uncommon, unfold out amongst lengthy, tedious stretches of gangster politicking that solely appear to exist to justify these motion scenes within the first place. At 88 minutes, Pretty Lethal can hardly be accused of overstaying its welcome, and but an excessive amount of of that run time looks like filler. Certainly I couldn’t convey myself to care a lot what was occurring between Devora, Pasha and Pasha’s notoriously highly effective dad, and I didn’t get the sense the movie had a lot invested of their relationships both.

But oh, that climactic sequence. Once Pretty Lethal lastly reaches its huge showcase, it’s potential to see what this challenge might and will have been: a bonkers marriage of fantastical choreography and graphic brutality, classical magnificence and a really fashionable griminess. With that shiny shining quantity, the movie concurrently justifies all of the work it took to get there — and throws into sharp reduction simply how drab the remainder of it has been by comparability.