The Movie Guru: ‘The Drama’ fails, while ‘Pretty Lethal’ fails to live up to its potential

The Drama (in theaters)

No matter what the advertising tells you, “The Drama” is neither a romance or a comedy.

In someone else’s hands, it could have been a rather searing, traumatizing little drama that haunts you for days after watching it. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are both excellent actors, and both of them manage to fight off the script and direction often enough to offer glimpses of the film that might have been. It still wouldn’t have been at all pleasant to watch, but it would have said something interesting.

But writer/director Kristoffer Borgli doesn’t really care about doing that. Supposedly this is an absolutely tone-deaf attempt at satire, but all it’s really designed to do is upset people. He possibly could have made his darkly humorous version of the movie work with a hundred different lesser controversies, but he’s so pleased with himself he’s making a big fuss about keeping this movie’s central controversy a secret. He wants to slap people in the face when they’re sitting on the theater, and if you want that experience it’s best to stop reading here.

The movie is about a couple whose impending marriage is thrown for a loop when the groom learns the bride’s terrible secret. That secret is that she planned a detailed school shooting as a teenager, but never followed through with it. Zendaya’s character treats this as if it’s on the same level as cheating, or perhaps a teenage marriage. The movie is horrified that everyone else is horrified.

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Played in all seriousness, this could work as a movie. With a less awful secret, this could work as a dark comedy. As it is, the movie is nothing more than a whoopie cushion – full of sound and fury, signifying only the immaturity of the one who decided to use it.

Worse, a real whoopie cushion is funnier. 

Grade: One star

Pretty Lethal (Prime)

Even the best idea stumbles if you don’t get the execution right.

Hollywood has flirted with ballet-based action in the last few years, most successfully in 2024’s “Abigail.” But the new movie “Pretty Lethal” takes that a step further, finally putting actual, non-vampiric dancers in the middle of the fight. This pays off in one incredible fight scene where the girls attach razor blades to their toe shoes, easily the best part of the movie. In it, you see a glimpse of what might have been.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn’t even come close to living up to that moment. The setting, a “Dracula”-style Hungarian inn re-skinned to be an ode to “The Nutcracker,” distracts from the actual story. It even distracts the screenwriter and director, since the movie spends far too long with the Hungarian mobsters and the bodies they cut up. Every moment spent with them could have been far better spent developing the ballet dancers more.

As it is, actress and dancer Maddie Zeigler, playing the streetwise Bones, is by far the most interesting and watchable of the ballet dancers. Uma Thurman has some fun moments as the villain, but the script hampers her at every turn.

There was potential here. But “Pretty Lethal” didn’t live up to it.

Grade: Two stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society and the Utah Film Critics Association. Drop her a line at themovieguruslc@gmail.com.