Last year’s Ballerina, or as Lionsgate’s marketing team would prefer us to say From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, failed as both proof that the Keanu Reeves-led franchise could support expansion and that “ballet action thriller” could be a worthy new genre. The title, in whichever format audiences came across it, was both confusing and misleading, the film ultimately featuring very little in the way of actual dance moves.
For those who left the cinema enraged at Ana de Armas’s lack of arabesque kills, they can get their fill at home this week with Amazon’s fresh-from-SXSW actioner Pretty Lethal, a film all about ballet dancers actually using their skills to slaughter a string of eastern European bad guys. It’s a neat idea, positioning women who might be untrained fighters but who have grit and stamina learned from a gruelling form of dance many underestimate, and in an overcrowded field, it gives it a slight yet elegantly extended, leg up.
