READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME: 2 STARS. “like a hole in the roof, bigger isn’t better.”
SYNOPSIS: In “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” a sequel to the 2019 horror comedy “Ready or Not,” Grace MacCaullay is once again targeted by the 1% in a deadly game of hide ‘n seek. “It’s not round two… it’s sudden death.”
CAST: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.
REVIEW: The new film picks up immediately after newlywed Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) survived her new family’s deadly game of hide ‘n seek. Still dressed in her blood stained wedding dress and smoking a cigarette after the action-packed wedding night that left her fiancée and his entire family dead, she finds herself the target in an even deadlier diversion.
“By surviving Hide and Seek you’ve triggered a new game,” says the lawyer for the aristocratic game players (Elijah Wood). “This time against the High Council families. Double or nothing. This part will be familiar. They will try and kill you.”
The High Council families are the 1% of the 1%. Rich beyond belief, their money and power is the result of a deal with the devil, and now they must hunt and kill Grace and sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) for the chance to sit in the “high seat,” the world’s most powerful position.
Questions is, can devil worshippers outwit, outplay and outlast two resourceful women named for the pious properties of grace and faith?
Like many sequels “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” is bigger than the original. There are more characters, more gore, two protagonists—Grace now has a sister, even if they aren’t close. “Biologically speaking, we’re sisters,” Faith says, “but we’re not family.”—and the stakes are higher.
But, like a pimple or a hole in the roof, bigger isn’t better.
The new film, which features the same creative team as the 2019 original, directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, gets off to a fun start with Amy Winehouse’s version of the Shirelles classic “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” but soon devolves into a morass of exposition.
In the forty-five minutes before the “game” begins, Weaving has the unenviable task of recapping the plot of the first movie and later Wood wades through the over complicated history of the High Council and the rules of the hunt for Grace and Faith. It’s clunky and even though Weaving and Newton spark off one another, and Wood appears to be having fun, it’s s slog. ighkjfk
What follows is a litany of near misses, bland action choreography and gallons of grizzly gore. The fight sequences are uninspired, although a battle involving pepper spray has the kind of exuberance missing from the other action scenes.
“Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” has a few laughs—Faith pleads for her life with the well-delivered line: “No, no I’m her emergency contact!”—but the needlessly complicated story leans into the evil without the absurdity that made the first movie so much fun.
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