At no times did I doubt their commitment to
Sparkle Motion
dir: Vicky Jewson
2026
They’re Pretty? And they’re Lethal? What a clever title!
Like, maybe for a great-grandma, amused by the simplest of wordplay, but she shouldn’t watch the flick, oh no, she’d hate it!
I don’t entirely know who the market for this flick is, but it seems like a brilliant idea and I can’t believe no-one else hasn’t thought of it yet. I mean, except for all the other films where they do the same thing.
Its singular premise is that professional ballerinas are extremely well trained at what they do, extremely fit and very strong, with a high tolerance for pain. With a bit of improvisation and sufficient motivation, if they had to, they could carve their way through a succession of goons like the reaper’s scythe through summer wheat, and look fabulous while doing it.
There was a whole-arse John Wick adjacent flick last year called, you guessed it, Ballerina. Ana de Armas? Did anyone other than me see it? He-hello?
I mean, I know it’s implausible, but implausibility is a central part of movie making magic. They don’t call it a “willing suspension of disbelief” because movies are meant to always be difficult to believe yet oh so realistic.
The Neverending Story ended, and had sequels, that also ended. Tom Cruise can run for real but probably can’t save the world from nuclear destruction by sky diving into the North Sea and diving to a sunken submarine and finding a flash drive and then riding a motorbike onto a plane or train and doing it all just before some timer gets two seconds before zero, and do it all over again like 8 times. Even if he can run really fast and occasionally does some of his own stunts.
As an idea, it’s not that implausible. I mean, in terms of the women they corralled together to play prima ballerinas that can get shit done and massacre a bunch of Hungarian Andrew Tates / Timothée Chalamets, they picked the right ones for their roles.
It is a bit of a reach to accept that women that have been training six hours a day since they were children and starving themselves for a decade could make the transition to brutal killers so quickly, but their art/craft requires them to be extremely fit, flexible and dedicated to perfection in all their movements, so really, what’s the diff?
There’s no doubt they could kick ass, the only question is whether they’ll be able to put aside their petty squabbling and fight together to save each other from certain doom.
The absurdity is part of the point, but visually, in an action movie context, it’s brilliant. The best parts of any action films (for me, only for me) that have people perpetrating lurid acts of violence is when the protagonists are (feral) men or women, the choreography is graceful / precise / brutal, and the antagonists are awful men seeking to do them harm. It was only ever the attraction (for me) of the peak Hong Kong wuxia heroic bloodshed-era flicks I watched in grotty Chinatown cinemas back in the day, or the countless samurai flicks my eyeballs eagerly drank up, and I’m delighted to see such action yet again today.
I’m not blind to how dumb the flick is. It’s an action flick. A certain level of dumbness is required. You can’t have dumb fun otherwise, can you?
The truth is, when the flick starts, it felt like I was watching one of those horrible Eli Roth Hostel flicks. It’s pretty much the same set up: a group of naïve Americans travels to a shitty part of a beautiful European country, and are set upon by the gross locals who try to butcher them all for fun and profit as revenge for American arrogance.
But these prima ballerinas are not content to be victims! They’ve endured so much physical pain and body shaming for so many years, and they absolutely have to get to the big ballerina competition in Budapest, so they’re not going to let something as petty as a criminal turf war stop them from performing on time.
When their bus breaks down, they hoof it to the one building they can find in an entire forest. The building is massive, and three tall storeys high, and comes with maybe three levels of (murder) basements, and completely doesn’t conform in time and space with any building in our earthly realm. But it does have a bar, and a stage, and countless booths for low level hoods and tracksuit mafia to lounge around on.
Devora (Uma Thurman), the head of some bullshit criminal gang runs the building / goons like a fiefdom, in which she gets to make the life and death decisions but, wouldn’t you know it, she’s a big fan of ballet. Like, ballet is her life, kind of thing.
She doesn’t love ballet enough to spare the five women from the contrived reason they’re on the butcher’s block, in fact, she calls an exterminator whose job it’s meant to be to kill them, harvest sellable parts, and then render them unidentifiable for the authorities. Passports and phones are burned. Uncrossable bridges are crossed, multiple dice are cast.
But at least she still loves the classics, unlike most of her goons, who seem to share Chalamet’s disdain for the so-called legacy arts like opera and ballet. Boo!
And their hygiene is well below reproach. All they do is sit around drinking, waiting for the sadistic commands of their leader who has watched, in the run up to doing this movie, Sunset Boulevard a few too many times. Which is why it could be a bit of a disappointment to people thinking Uma Thurman has been cast in this because of Kill Bill and her performance as Beatrix Kiddo, when instead they’re going to get Gloria Swanson / Norma Desmond telling Mr DeMille that she’s ready for her close up, now.
The ballerinas initially all hate each other or mostly hate each other, but as luck would have it their experiences together being hunted / brutalised bring them closer and make them a formidable killing unit of tutu-wearing proteges. There’s an actual character called Princess (Lana Condor) and she’s obviously well adjusted and not emotionally stunted at all from growing up in extreme wealth. There’s surly Bones (Maddie Ziegler), who hates Princess and tolerates the others, but that’s because she’s Poor, and from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, probably. And there’s another ballerina who’s a godbother (Avantika) and always quoting The Jesus, but she unintentionally drugs herself with MDMA or something similar, and then realises The Jesus isn’t going to help her out of this perverted hell: She needs to embrace Lord Satan and start killing motherfuckers dead.
And there’s two other dancers as well.
Do these personality and background differences matter in the slightest? Fuck no. Did I even care if any of them had names? Well… look, I will say they all attack their roles with gusto, and they give the perfect level of goofy screaming seriousness to their performances that a flick like this needs. I knew none of the girls would get seriously hurt, and I knew no matter what the awful male goons tried to do to them or said to them, their learned opponents were all most likely going to die screaming (check!) Because that’s the kind of movie it is: it doesn’t have a solo grim avenger stomping around grimly shooting people in the face and grinding his jaw at the same time. It has five young women adapting to the situation, remembering their training, and attaching blades to the tips of their ballet shoes, before doing their pliès, sautès, relevès and arabesques all to the detriment of those who would seek to harm them.
And that brings me joy, as it should. Athletic types in their prime dispatching paunchy jerks who arrogantly assume these delicate flowers, these swans will wilt! No, no, they will launch themselves skyward, swoop down, and slice & dice, and slaughter their way to freedom.
I think those scenes of carnage are well choreographed and well shot (well enough, at least). Maddie Ziegler probably comes out of this the best, making a showcase for herself as a potential action star down the track, and she manages to balance the supreme physicality we know she can bring (if you’ve seen any of those Sia film clips, and the years of bullshit she put up with on Dance Moms), it’s just that now it’s in the service of stylish slaughter. I also liked her snarky persona, because, what’s not to like? Natural leaders can come from anywhere except the back seats of limousines.
Princess is fine as a character as well, I mean she’s supremely annoying, but then most teenagers / people in their early 20s are supremely annoying. If you’re not in your early twenties, do you work with any 21, 22 year olds? They can be wonderful, brilliant and funny, but damn can they still be annoying.
Most of these characters are on that side of the equation, but that’s okay. Contrast them with the shallow, callow men on offer here, and they end up looking and sounding like wise sages in comparison.
And they’re very funny (at least for me). It’s not a long flick, the action is definitely not non-stop, there are lots of lulls, but the witty camaraderie (or the lack thereof) amused me enough to wait for the next time they’d cut loose.
It entertained me. For 90 or so minutes I wasn’t thinking about the Straits of Hormuz, Dire Straits, or any straits for that matter, and that’s got to be a good thing.
7 times Pretty Lethal is often pretty deadly out of 10
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“These guys are drunk and out of shape, and we’re prima fucking ballerinas!” – damn straight - Pretty Lethal
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