Ready or Not 2: Here I Come – Another Fun Yet Flawed Game (Early Review)

On a dime, if one was to be asked in 2019 what film was not likely to receive a sequel in the near future, chances are that ‘Ready or Not‘ would feature on several lists. The 2019 smash hit, directed by Radio Silence duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, brought to life the world’s deadliest hide-and-seek game, as a newly wedded bride fought through her in-laws and her husband to live to see the next day. It ended well, with the bride smoking a cigarette while soaked in blood as the home burned down and all the murderous in-laws had exploded like balloons. The game was over for her…but the game wasn’t over with her.

Enter Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, helmed once again by Radio Silence, and picking up right where the first left off. Grace (Weaving) may have lived to tell the tale and received a nod of approval from a devilish ghost, but the death of the La Domas family would alert the High Council of Families, who are now hunting down Grace in order to balance out a major power inconsistency now facing the council: who runs it after the fall of the La Domas. Once again, Grace has to make it alive till dawn to win and get out of yet another situation against the Danforth family, but there’s a twist this time: her younger sister Faith (Newton) is now in the mix and a target as well, making Grace’s situation more intense as the two now have to put aside their differences and work together to survive.

Ready or Not 2 doesn’t waste a whole lot of time getting right to the stuff everyone is paying to see: more violent kills and a whole lot more blood. Once the word gets out that Grace is alive, the family quickly mobilizes and brings her in, and the hunt swiftly begins. On its more spectacle-driven fronts, the sequel doubles down on the original film’s most entertaining aspects, leading to some very entertaining sequences where different family members corner the two sisters and try to eliminate them, such as one hilariously fun but also very intense dance floor fight involving pepper spray. Radio Silence, once again, know how to deliver on the absurdities the “Ready or Not” franchise has established thus far, and come fully prepared to drench their actors in fake blood once more. And much like the original, there is also a sense of acute self-awareness to much of what is established, down to the obvious naming of sisters Grace and Faith and the casting of genre favorites like Gellar and Elijah Wood.

As Grace, Weaving once again gets to shine as the newly married and then widowed bride having to try and make her way through another night of taking on murder-crazed adversaries, wielding either a shotgun or some object to attack with while letting out war cries and yells soaked in blood, and she plays it effortlessly, proving she is one of the best in the genre acting today. Similarly, Newton, as Faith, adds a solid layer to the material, bringing to life the sibling rivalry between her and Grace well and giving them a bit of an emotional backbone to fall back on as the violence escalates. The film slows down ever so slightly at times to let these moments breathe, and Weaving and Newton make the best of those moments. As more time is spent with the Danforths, Shawn Hatosy proves to be the most memorable of the bunch, turning in a menacing performance as Titus, an increasingly twisted brother to Gellar’s Ursula, who is rather cold and calculated herself for a majority of the runtime.

Backed once again by a few fun needle drops and some solid visuals, Ready or Not 2 also moves at a rather relentless pace, with nary a dull moment between one encounter to the next, keeping in line with the structure of the first film. It is a shame, then, that despite so many of the positives in the first ‘Ready or Not’ echoed this time around, the sequel falls a bit short. Much of the narrative has an odd fixation when it comes to trying to justify why it exists, and why Grace and Faith are in this specific situation. While the first kept things more ambiguous in that regard, only really alluding to its more supernatural elements towards the final act, by setting up a story based rather stringently on rules–delivered mostly by Wood’s character simply named The Lawyer, clearly having a lot of fun with the role–it takes away from some of the series’ mystery and unexpectedness. That feeling of said lack of unexpectedness is also echoed in the movie’s more thrilling sequences, as many of them play out similar to the first film in terms of its twists and turns, making this sequel feel more predictable as a whole.

Perhaps the movie’s biggest flaw, however, is its handling of the new characters. Besides Newton, Hatosy and Gellar–and for one standout action sequence, Maia Jae–getting time to shine with their material, the rest of the cast from Wood, Nestor Carbonell and Kevin Durand, and renowned director David Cronenberg are relegated to only a few moments, or even one extended moment in total, and have next to no new material to work with. As a result, much of the characterization past a point is rather nonexistent, and makes for some unfortunately forgettable turns from the supporting characters. By adding nothing more to them, and only offering nuggets of humor to keep some of them on screen after some time, there is no connection formed to any new cast members by the end. While the first film was not entirely innocent of this flaw, it feels far more accentuated in the sequel, and leads to far more glaring issues, as audiences learn nothing much about the High Council or the Danforths by the end.

Still, by the end of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, it’s hard not to enjoy some of the action and humor provided by Radio Silence, as the extraneous amounts of gore and violence and splatters of fake blood (sorry to all the PAs who had to clean some of that up) make for some crowd-pleasing moments that will surely have many cheering at screenings, and having much of the spectacle anchored by someone as committed and charismatic as Samara Weaving once again, and a charming turn from Kathryn Newton as well. Time will tell if the team reconvene to tell another story in the ‘Ready or Not’ series, but for now, this sequel proves a fun, if rather flawed, experience.

still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

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Shaurya Chawla