Critic Reviews

You don’t watch a movie like this for character or dialogue, you watch it to see fierce, strong young women twirl, kick, and stab their way through a pack of mobsters to the sound of Tchaikovsky. On that front, Pretty Lethal delivers. Brava, ladies!

The choreography is expectedly graceful and thrilling. It’s the elements in between the carnage, from underdeveloped characters to a confusing plot, that could have used a few more practice sessions to refine.

The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step.

The film is lean, mean, and feisty, even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Pretty Lethal is at its best when it’s a straightforward film about bloody fights and survival. This isn’t the most complex concept, and when the movie tries to include unnecessary details, it stops the narrative dead in its tracks.

Nothing here is to be taken very seriously at all but it is mostly devoid of the suffocating, and often nihilistic, smugness one has come to expect from modern action films.

The drawback here is that, although it doesn’t need a deep story, it feels like only two and a half acts, with an abrupt third act.

If you think ballerinas using their dance skills to fight and kill bad guys sounds fun, Pretty Lethal does deliver on its premise. However, it takes too long to get going, and is ultimately a somewhat amusing trifle instead of the more fun spectacle it could have been.

Pretty Lethal doesn’t even fully take flight once it finally escapes the realm of good taste, though it does feature a handful of standout moments and images. You might scratch your head a few times, but you also may enjoy yourself if you only want the filmmakers to embrace their unhinged high-concept premise

Director Vicky Jewson and her stunt team... properly make dance a large part of its central characters' fight sequences, which gives them a very different flavor. However, this only elevates the film so far beyond its fairly underwhelming script.