‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’ Review

When I first heard they were making a sequel to ‘Ready or Not’, I was immediately disappointed. Oh great, Hollywood is taking a surprise hit, sprinkling in some starry names, and running it back in a creatively bankrupt sequel hoping to squeeze as much profit as they can before audiences catch on.

Unfortunately, my initial suspicions were mostly proven correct. When ‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’ gets to its hunt, it still contains some of the darkly comic thrills that made its predecessor so surprising, and yet it lacks that film’s charming small scale storytelling, struggling with the need for convoluted lore required to justify its existence.

‘Ready or Not 2’ opens right where the previous film left off, with Grace (Samara Weaving), covered in blood, sitting outside of the Le Domas estate after surviving a night of terror as her new in-laws tried to kill her in a ritualistic game of deadly hide and seek. In the hospital, recovering from her wounds and shock, she is visited by her estranged sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton). After telling Faith the whole story, they both find themselves kidnapped by the satanic cult of which the Le Domas family were a part. With Grace’s victory in the Le Domas game of hide and seek, the cult must play a game all together to determine which of the council families will now be the leader. Representatives from each of the five families will now hunt Grace and Faith in a new game of hide and seek and if Grace survives until dawn, she will have her freedom.

As you might expect given a sequel’s natural inclination toward world building, ‘Ready or Not 2’ takes awhile to get where it’s going. It has to introduce the sister, then five new families, a mysterious lawyer, and a dying patriarch. Then we need a new game, with new stakes and rules, all of which needs enough detail to at least try to make it all believable. It comes as a welcome relief when the hunt actually starts, and the new overpacked cast of characters can start being whittled down.

The action and mayhem, once it does come, never quite matches the fun of the first film, though it comes closest to capturing that magic in two scenes involving a laundry room and a joyously pathetic fight involving pepper spray.

Filled with so many legends from genre film and television, the cast uniformly brings their best even if their characters are more punchline than human being. The stars of the show are Samara Weaving, as our can-you-believe-this-shit hero and Shawn Hatosy as her most relentless hunter. Weaving opens the film in shock from the events of the first film, and then progresses into various degrees of PTSD, sometimes resorting to simple animalistic screams at the nonstop horror that never makes sense to her. Hatosy on the other hand is pure psychopath, childlike in one moment and sadistic the next, never telegraphing his next move since not even he seems to know it.

Weaving and Kathryn Newton play convincing sisters, with their emotional arc the core of the film, yet their dynamic grows tiring as one accuses the other of abandoning them, only for the other to turn it around, repeat ad nauseam. While this may be a believable sister dynamic, it often feels like the filmmakers are just buying time, unsure what to have them talk about, while they build to a bigger reconciliation.

If you enjoyed the first ‘Ready or Not’, as I did, you will still most likely enjoy the sequel. People get stabbed, shot, blown up and are victims of all sorts of delirious, blood soaked carnage that entertains even if it’s no longer fresh or surprising.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, pervasive language and brief drug use.
Running Time: 1 hour and 48 minutes

Director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Writers Guy Busick, R. Christopher Murphy
Stars Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood
Rating R
Running Time 108 Minutes
Genres Comedy, Horror, Thriller