tTo give reluctant credit to 2019’s irritating horror-comedy Ready or Not, it arrived before the Trump eat the rich era became an entire and increasingly exhausting subgenre in itself. The film, about a woman who discovers that her new husband’s wealthy family members are devil worshippers, was clearly indebted to Get Out, but landed before The Menu, Blink Twice, Triangle of Sadness, The Hunt, Knives Out, Infinity Pool, Opus and many, many others, a medal for speed, if not much more.
The sequel took a surprising amount of time, mainly because the team behind it (directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) was busy rebooting the Scream franchise as well as Abigail the Toothless Vampire, but also one imagines due to the difficulties of extending a film in which everyone but the final girl had spontaneously combusted by the end. In a world where horror and superhero franchises have started to look more and more like soap operas in their absurd and rule-less plot (not dead, all a dream, different universe, etc.), Ready or Not 2: Here I Come was still inevitable regardless of logic. What’s strange given the seven-year gap is that the second film takes place immediately after the first, Halloween II style, with heroine Grace, played by Samara Weaving, looking noticeably and understandably different.
She is rushed from the scene of the averted sacrifice to the hospital, but is faced with a cascade of whos, whats and whys from a bewildered detective. It’s always interesting to play with the question of what would really happen to the survivor of a horror movie massacre that defies reasoning (the original ending to Jordan Peele’s Get Out provided a grimly realistic answer), but writers Guy Busick and R Christopher Murphy are eager to get us back into the action. This time, Grace has to play hide-and-seek with her sister Faith (Abigail survivor Kathryn Newton) and faces multiple enemies from multiple families. In scenes stifled by exposition, like someone reading the rules of a game he no longer wants to play, Elijah Wood’s lawyer explains that by Grace surviving the previous game of hide-and-seek and killing an entire bloodline, she has now sparked a larger battle for global supremacy, and every powerful satanic family head must try to kill her before dawn to get a seat at the head of the table.
Bigger might be better when it comes to some of the sillier aspects of a B-movie sequel like this, with a marked budget increase allowing for some more artfully flashy gore (death by an industrial washing machine is a highlight), but not with the expansion of a mythology that takes the film into the terminology-filled world of juvenile fantasy. The stakes now are ridiculously high at MCU levels (planet control!) and the movie feels less like a horror movie and more like an action comedy, something closer to a John Wick wannabe (a franchise that became equally complicated over time). There was little room for genuine emotion, fear or humanity in the extremely self-satisfied first film, and here, with a fractured sister dynamic at the center, there’s also an attempt to overstate our investment. Like the original, however, it’s a film more interested in creating marketable Funko Pops than actual characters, obsessed with images that stubbornly insist on their iconic status over the people we actually care about. The sisters talk to each other like video game characters (first draft dialogue like “I was 18 and it was a once-in-a-lifetime scholarship!” is said with a straight face) and while Newton valiantly tries to sell it, Weaving is both high-volume and low-power. Like the film around her, she is loud but ineffective.
It’s not like he has much to work with anyway, his final girl is a hard-to-root pile of garbage with knowing looks, generic trademarks (she likes a cigarette!), and Halloween costume iconography (wedding dress but blood) that didn’t even get in the first movie. There’s more fun to be had with the cast aimed at the millennials around her, with Wood joined by her Faculty co-star Shawn Hatosy and former Vampire Slayer Sarah Michelle Gellar, who had enough fun to bleed into the audience. But it’s all too familiar not just in its now pretty played-up message that “rich people suck” (they do, but still!) or its many influences (it’s John Wick but also the R-rated Hunger Games, which itself was just a PG-13 Battle Royale) but in its smug, SXSW-ready tone (in fact, it premiered at Austin’s first genre festival). It is the “well, that “It just happened,” most jokes involve yelling, swearing, or yelling. and profanity and then the inevitable fight scene set to a discordant ’80s soft rock ballad (Total Eclipse of the Heart, of course). It’s all too clumsily calculated to deliver the raucous two-shot explosion it so desperately wants us to have, and in a year that’s already given us examples of better, bolder-than-usual B movies (Sam Raimi’s Send Help and Crazed Monkey Horror Primate), it creaks that much louder. It’s a film production too in love with itself to care if you love it too.
