Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Starring: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Néstor Carbonell, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood, Kevin Durand
2019's Ready or Not was a mediocre riff on the old The Most Dangerous Game template of a pleb being hunted by wealthy elites. The twist was that the murderous toffs weren't engaging in their hunt for the love of the sport but rather to avert a family curse that eventually saw them all explode at dawn, having failed to kill their prey. As a horror-comedy it was a dud for two reasons: the final girl, Samara Weaving's Grace, was so competent compared to her antagonists that we never felt she was in any real danger; and it simply wasn't funny.
You would think adding Kathryn Newton to a sequel would make it an automatic improvement on the original, but Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (the inclusion of that numeral annoyingly botching the pun of the title) is somehow even worse than its predecessor.
Taking its cue from Halloween II, Ready or Not 2 opens in the immediate aftermath of the first movie and finds its heroine waking in a similarly empty hospital. Grace is visited by her estranged kid sister Faith (Newton), which provides her an opportunity to recount the events of the first movie in a monologue (if you're going to do this, at least give us some clips from the original). Faith is understandably dubious until another killer elite (a cameoing Kevin Durand) turns up at the hospital and attacks the siblings before they're knocked out by "The Lawyer" (Elijah Wood in one of his customary creepy little dude roles), a legal representative of the Satanic elites. Waking up handcuffed together in the mansion from the first movie, Grace and Faith find themselves the prey in yet another hunt, featuring a diverse array of rich assholes from across the globe.
It takes a special kind of talent to make a movie in which a pair of handcuffed hotties are hunted by elites as boring as Ready or Not 2. Roger Corman must be rolling in his grave at how the filmmakers (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who recently made a dog's dinner of the Scream franchise) have botched such a simple premise. Any comic potential from the 39 Steps/Defiant Ones shtick of having two bickering protagonists chained together is squandered by a lack of witty banter between the sisters. Instead Grace and Faith improbably pause every few minutes to recount familial backstory that none of us care about. Newton is one of the funniest actresses of her generation (check out her scene stealing cameo in Griffin in Summer), so it's particularly wasteful to lumber her with limp dialogue that fails to exploit her comic talents.
The handcuffs are removed pretty early on, leaving us to wonder how a more inventive filmmaker might have incorporated them as a weapon in the action. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett are a poor choice to helm what is essentially a Die Hard clone in horror-comedy cosplay, as they fail to stage their action scenes in exciting or unique ways. I couldn't help but look back fondly on the days when movies like this would hire Hong Kong action directors who knew how to pull this sort of filmmaking off with style. Ready or Not 2 seems less concerned with its action and more invested in its tedious world-building. It's constantly slowed down to change the rules and bring up some new subsection of the contract. Look, I came here for handcuffed hotties killing poshos, not a legal drama about inheritance clauses. The Church of Satan should sue the filmmakers for making their religion look so bloody boring.
As with the first movie, the villains are so clownish that there are no real stakes. As cartoonish as they are, the baddies have no distinct personalities and are distinguishable only by race and nationality. Sarah Michelle Gellar is jettisoned in to add some Gen X horror cred but is given nothing of note to work with. The only good thing that will come out of Ready or Not 2 is the movie David Cronenberg makes with the fee he received for his three-minute cameo. If you're craving a movie about a young woman hunted in a confined setting, I recommend seeking out the innovative 2024 indie Hunt Her Kill Her instead.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is in UK/ROI cinemas from March 20th.
