Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready Or Not (2019) is one of the great underrated horror/comedy gems of the 2010s, full of spite and bile, painted blood-red crimson and draped in a wedding dress. The sequel, Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, promises, as sequels do, to be bigger, better, and more carnage–filled. And as you’d expect from a sequel, it’s less focused and more generic. It’s still entertaining enough that it’s not a chore to sit through, but (again, as is usual in these exercises) the second doesn’t understand why the first was something special.
The sequel starts right where the first ended up; new bride Grace (Samara Weaving) is sitting outside the burning mansion of the Le Domas game company, having survived a game of murderous hide-and-seek with her psychopathic Satanic in-laws, who are now all dead. She thinks she’s in the clear—but it turns out that Satan (aka Mr. Le Bail) had a pact with a cluster of wealthy evil families. Those evil-doers now, for intricate reasons, kidnap Grace and her long-lost sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) for yet another round of hunt and murder.
What elevated Ready Or Not above its peers (and above other Bettinelli-Olpin/Gillett films like Abigail) was the way its sit-com family dynamics slid with so little resistance through the pulp flesh of the slasher. The Le Domases were familiar, rich assholes—the eccentric aunt, the friendly mom with razor-sharp teeth, the weak son, the hapless coke-head daughter and her vapid husband—and then they all pick up crossbows and battle-axes and go staggering around the house accidentally murdering the help and whining about how much they hate each other and how unfair they’ve got it being ultra-rich and having to work at murder for a night rather than having someone else do everything for them. They’re charming and funny and worthless—even unto the supposedly good guy who married Grace, even unto those cute kids. The movie’s a portrait of evil as inbred vapidity, and it only gets more relevant the longer we slog forward into the era of Trump, Melania and Kushner and their repulsive entourage—not least as we cheer for the Le Domas family’s ridiculous and squishy ends.
The sequel abandons the tight-knit family drama for a more sprawling network of loosely affiliated global oligarchs. The result is less, and less telling character development. But worse than that is that the film, rather helplessly, ends up attributing actual competence to at least some of its antagonists.
The evil patriarch who uses the devil’s power to control the world, Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg) is presented as ruthless, focused, and effective. His children, Ursula and Titus (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy) also have a tiresome habit of laying plots that work. Titus in particular becomes, over the course of the film, more and more of a garden-variety supervillain sociopath, rather than just a bumbling asshole/sociopath who has stumbled into power.
This makes Grace and Faith’s survival a lot less believable. But worse than that, it makes the film significantly duller—and, not coincidentally, less mean-spirited. Part of the joy of the first film was that the Le Domas family was sympathetic and charming in many respects, while also unquestionably evil; the movie made you feel for them even as you rooted for their deaths, giving a queasy frisson to both Grace’s defeats and her victories. In contrast, in Ready Or Not 2, Titus is just a boring bad guy we’ve seen thousands of times before—just like Faith is the spunky estranged sister we’ve seen over and over again, following the plot arc you’d expect when you read the words “spunky estranged sister.”
This isn’t to say that there are no redeeming features. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett still have a knack for the giggly grotesque—the set piece with the power washer is great, as is a fight scene with the opponents blinded by pepper spray on a dance floor, and the climactic battle of all against all in Satan’s foul pit. The bodies-exploding-in-a-spray-of-blood gag never gets old either. So if you love Ready Or Not, you’ll probably like this.