What if a flock of ballerinas were stranded in a dive bar, where they must fight a vicious mob boss to get out alive? That’s the premise of Pretty Lethal, the new action comedy starring Lana Condor (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before), Millicent Simmonds (A Quiet Place), Avantika (Mean Girls 2024), Iris Apatow (The Bubble), and Maddie Ziegler, who was the center of such iconic Sia music videos as “Chandelier” and “Elastic Heart.”
The plotline seems like something out of a ’70s exploitation film, where ultra-femininity collides with gruesome, graphic violence. However, the cast feels more in line for a reboot of Sugar & Spice or Bring It On, teen comedies that relied on charming ingenues and high-energy antics. Like exploitation movies that capitalized on emerging media trends, Pretty Lethal seems to walk in the footsteps of recent ballerina-does-violence movies, like the 2024 horror-comedy Abigail, about a pint-sized vampire girl who paired her fangs with a tutu, and 2025’s Ballerina, a John Wick spinoff starring Ana de Armas. Notably, Pretty Lethal is produced by John Wick helmer David Leitch. So, audiences might well expect the kind of sleek style and jaw-dropping violence of that franchise.
Unfortunately, Pretty Lethal pales in comparison to all of these potential inspiration points. It’s just not outrageous or surprising enough to rise above feeling like an imitator.
Pretty Lethal feels pretty basic.
Uma Thurman plays a bar owner with a ballet past in “Pretty Lethal.”
Credit: Prime Video
Written by Kate Freund and directed by Vicky Lewson, Pretty Lethal begins in a ballet studio, where an American troupe of teen ballerinas is preparing for a big competition overseas.
Faster than they can pirouette, their personalities are clear. Condor is the rich and privileged mean girl who feels entitled to the principal dancer role. Naturally, her name is Princess. And she absolutely loathes Bones, who is poor, tough as nails, and the best dancer, so she’s played by Ziegler. Sweet, good girl Grace (Avantika) is deeply Christian and wishes the girls wouldn’t fight — and would find Jesus as their personal lord and savior. Meanwhile, sisters Chloe (Simmonds) and Zoe (Apatow) are low-key fighting because Chloe, who is deaf, doesn’t appreciate Zoe’s overeager babying of her at every turn.
They’re struggling to come together as a dance troupe. But when their bus breaks down in Hungary on the way to the competition, the five girls and their instructor stumble across a decadent bar called the Teremok Inn. Inside, they find mementos from the owner’s (Uma Thurman) time as a ballet dancer. But the whole place, once luxurious, is stained by years of neglect, bar fights, and resentment.
It’s not long before a confrontation with a handsy patron leads to their instructor being murdered before their very eyes. Can these ballerinas put their personal issues aside and turn their art into a martial art to survive?
Pretty Lethal lacks a distinctive style.
There’s promise in the Teremok Inn, as its interior immediately suggests a time of splendor and possibility long eroded by something ugly. However, Lewson falls into the tiresome color palette of dingy greens tinting mustards, magentas, and teals. This look has become tediously standard in any action movie trying to affect a chic John Wick vibe (see also: Hotel Artemis).
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Beyond that, though, even the ballerina’s outfits are frustratingly expected. When they arrive, soaked to the bone from walking in the rain, a snarling bartender demands they put on dry clothes. Obviously, that means their meticulously white uniforms, complete with pointe shoes and long tutus. Now, a white dress (like a white T-shirt) is a perfect canvas for the anticipated sprays of blood as they’ll brawl with dangerous Hungarian goons. But the simple design of these dresses does nothing to distinguish the girls from one another or to add panache to the film’s production design.
These uninspired visuals don’t help the screenplay, which reads like a mediocre ’90s teen comedy. The familiar archetypes of tough girl, mean girl, good girl, and bickering sisters is one thing, but the lack of zinging dialogue is another. None of Princess’ barbs are stinging enough to remember. The battling between sisters is frustratingly surface-level. And halfway through, the “good girl” act gets so tedious that Grace is forced into a psychedelic drug trip. There, at least we get some unexpected visual flair, as towering nutcrackers come to life to warn her to run.
Yet in the midst of those hallucinations, I wondered if the movie would be more visually exciting if Lewson had rejected the cool-toned approach and embraced the brightly colored, high-saturated, ultra-femme color palettes of films like Mean Girls, Bring It On, or But I’m a Cheerleader. Rather than undercutting the grime of the Hungarian bar, such a palette might have made the turn to violence less telegraphed. And to see blood spray in such a vivid setting would have been more surprising and even funnier.
Pretty Lethal has solid action.
Be warned: It takes a while to get to the ballerinas-fight-back stage of the movie. Freund attempts some semblance of realism by having the girls scream, run, and panic for quite a while before they decide to weapon up and fight back. However, when we finally get to this point, Pretty Lethal is pretty fun.
It’s not just that a razor blade at the point of a ballet slipper turns out to be the perfect way to slit an enemy’s throat with a proper fouetté turn. It’s also that seeing one of their number pull this off strengthens the others’ confidence. They finally begin to come together, and the energy of the film finally musters excitement. However, because it takes so long to get going, the final act feels chaotic. The turns it takes feel like shortcuts instead of earned. So, even when I enjoyed the bonkers action (like a bunch of ballerinas leaping away from an enormous explosion), I felt disconnected from the vicarious thrill of it all.
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There’s potential in the set pieces of Pretty Lethal, including a sequence where the girls perform ballet on a stage, their once pristine costumes grungy in blood and muck. But Lewson’s approach lacks punch in color, attitude, and music. The right song could have made this sequence rousing, but a simple piano isn’t enough to sell the undercurrent of emotions that are given a place to explode here. So, it’s more a whimper than a roar of a performance.
Speaking of performances, they’re all over the place. Perhaps that’s intentional, to illustrate how different these girls are from each other. To Condor’s credit, she successfully shakes off the rom-com heroine cheeriness of To All The Boys, recreating herself as a seething bitch. Ziegler, who shone in The Aftermath opposite Jenna Ortega, is solid as the guarded tough girl, but is at her best in the dance/fight scenes where she can rely on physicality to speak for her. As was true in 2024’s Mean Girls, Avantika’s role was thin, but she’s solidly amusing as a clueless hanger-on. Simmonds is the best of the bunch, however, managing to work in teen lust and angst, even within a flimsy subplot. Apatow struggles the most with the thinly written characters, playing earnest to the point where she’s practically an echo. Thankfully, Thurman is darkly fun as a twisted former ballerina with an ax to grind.
In the end, Pretty Lethal is fine for a movie to throw on for a night in. But with this cast and this premise, I definitely anticipated something weirder and wilder and more satisfying.
Pretty Lethal was reviewed out of the 2026 SXSW Film Festival; it premieres on Prime Video on March 25.
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