Female-forward flicks like ‘Ready Or Not 2,’ ‘Pretty Lethal,’ and ‘They Will Kill You’ inject horror movie gore into the Daughters of Wick formula

A woman is trapped in a limited location where a group of people intend to kill her, sacrificing her to Satan to enrich their own power. Unwilling to surrender, she fights her way through various henchmen and/or big bosses, delivering cathartically gory, sometimes darkly funny kills in the process; though she sustains some gruesome injuries herself, she proves a much stronger fighter than her captors ever anticipated.

That is the premise of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which opened in theaters about a week ago. It is also the premise of They Will Kill You, which opened a week after that one. It is also not so far from the premise of Pretty Lethal, which is now streaming on Prime Video; there, it is a group of trapped women, rather than one or two, and Satan doesn’t get involved. It is the premise of a movie that seems to arrive both in theaters and on streaming semi-regularly. Most, though not all, premiere at South by Southwest. (The 2026 installment of that festival recently ended, which explains the number of post-SXSW movies looking to capitalize on typically hyped-up fest reactions.) Some of them premiere at Fantastic Fest in the fall.

The existence of these movies seems owed to the John Wick series, which has been dominating streaming charts throughout 2026 so far. (After the first three films occupied the HBO Max top 10 for weeks, the fourth has now lodged itself there.) Pretty Lethal in particular feels like it was inspired directly by Ballerina, last year’s spinoff where Ana de Armas played an assassin/protector trained by the ballet/assassin school seen in an earlier Wick installment. Ballerina does not include much actual ballet dancing. Pretty Lethal, on the other hand, is about a group of sometimes-testy teenage ballerinas who are waylaid on their way to a competition, at a hotel run by gangsters; when one criminal impulsively murders their chaperone, they must use their dancing skills to fight their way out. It’s what someone might come up with if you gave them the marketing title From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, and nothing else, which makes it especially funny that it hails from the same production company as that series.

At the same time, these movies are not quite the same as the daughters of Wick that appeared in such great number circa the early 2020s. Those films, like the Wick pictures, tended to involve assassins and/or some manner of espionage. The newer ones aspire to something a little more rough-and-tumble, placing greater emphasis on horror-movie gore; the Ready or Not movies have a supernatural component, and They Will Kill You more or less is a horror movie, just one where the Final Girl is a little more proactive about striking back at her enemies. The movies also take least a little inspiration from the modern action classic The Raid, and the dynamics of classic siege movies like Assault on Precinct 13. There’s plenty of the first volume of Kill Bill, specifically in its House of Blue Leaves segment; Pretty Lethal even casts Uma Thurman in a bad-guy role (though it doesn’t do much with her). And spiritually, it feels a bit like these movies are all running down that Oldboy hallway, too.

It sounds like pretty surefire stuff for hardcore-action crowdpleasing, and that does appear to be the general reaction at geek-friendly festivals like SXSW. Back in the world, though, these movies have a little more trouble catching on (though streaming will undoubtedly feed an audience to all of them in due course).

Some of it can be chalked up to the always-variable quality that comes whenever a flood of similar movies wash over the landscape. Pretty Lethal is an object lesson in the cold mathematics of this formula. Yes, it has at least 10 or 15 minutes’ worth of killer action choreography, where a quintet of familiar faces (Maddie Ziegler, Iris Apatow, Lana Condor, Millicent Simmonds, and Avantika) become unlikely marauders; finally, the sweet-natured gal from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before gets to kick some ass! And yes, it runs a slim 88 minutes with credits (so really more like 80, all in). As far as action movies go, that’s not a bad ratio. (Even the stuff that feels action-packed probably isn’t logging as much screentime as it feels; John Wick: Chapter 4 is an exception in that it has around an hour of pure action, and even that is embedded within a nearly three-hour runtime.)

But the non-action bits of Pretty Lethal are pretty, well, lethal in another way; it’s a toss-up whether the canned bitchiness, faux-sisterhood, and seemingly endless supply of scenes where Uma Thurman lurks around an old hotel are worthwhile to get to the fun ballerina-dealt kills. Ready or Not 2 has an even worse human story and a more woeful talk-to-action ratio. They Will Kill You works the best of these particular three, in part because it really embraces the gnarly horror aspect of its premise, but it’s still nowhere near as involving as the weird Wick world. Sometimes it takes more than a familiar face; just as Keanu Reeves brings an inimitable presence to his action movies, Zazie Beetz goes a long way toward anchoring They Will Kill You in some semblance of implied humanity.

Moreover, these movies do rely on some kind of transgressive kick; they market themselves as hard-R blasts of over-the-top fun, and doing that can rely on a distancing effect that may hold more appeal for certain brands of movie geeks than general audiences. While John Wick worked its way up the ladder, these movies come in guns blazing – as is their right, to be sure. Sometimes the geeks are right. But sometimes they’re devastatingly self-conscious, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that at least some of these splatter-siege would-be American samurai pictures are a little too deep into their screenwriters’ brains, despite stories that don’t appear to require much intricacy.

The fact that Ready or Not 2 and They Will Kill You rely on nearly the same relationship, with older sister attempting to save a younger sister who previously felt abandoned by her – not that different from Pretty Lethal, with its most combative ballerinas coming to a sisterly truce – speaks to the vaguely opportunistic way these movies use their female characters in particular, hoping charismatically badass leading ladies and the veneer of sisterhood will distract from how thinly conceived and phony it all feels. They wind up looking divided against themselves, drawn to a cinema of pure action-movie sensation while understandably unable to let go of more character-driven concerns; the movie will feel like an empty exercise without the latter, and struggling for the audience’s attention without plenty of the former. It’s the same battle between a cool loner and an endless barrage of cool-death henchmen, re-fought on the page.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
Stream Pretty Lethal on Prime Video