Last night I walked out of my local AMC into the cool spring evening full of energy. My thumbs wrote with lightning speed, embodying the spirit of a 1920s reporter firing off telegrams across the nation. Cartoon radio lines started emanating from nearby 5G towers as my Discord messages and Bluesky posts hit the airwaves, all carrying the same message: READY OR NOT 2 HAS THE JUICE.
I missed out on Ready or Not (2019) fever back in the day. I heard, as millions did, that was surprisingly fun for how rote the trailer looked. A pseudo-horror action comedy that had fun ideas and a good cast of character actors, but it just happened to be coming out at a time when it could easily be written off as “another one of those movies” during the deluge of game adaptations and escape room-esque horror premises.
While the original is not perfect, it’s charming enough and I bet it’s real fun with a group of people. Then the trailers for the sequel debuted and made it clear directors Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin understood the weak points of the first movie and fixed them.
What is Ready or Not?
For the uninitiated, the plot of Ready or Not is simple: Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) has just married into the Le Domas family, inheritors of a massive board game fortune. To bring her into the fold, the family makes Grace draw a card from a deck of games for her to play. Whoops, she draws hide and seek. The only card in the deck that triggers a lockdown of the estate so the Le Domas family can hunt her. If they catch her before dawn, they sacrifice her to their mysterious ghostly benefactor Mr. Le Bail. If they don’t, they die.
Short, simple, plenty of room for comedy. Honestly, the only real nitpick I have with the original is the deal itself. For the majority of the movie it’s left up in the air as to whether there’s anything supernatural happening, or if these rich people have deluded themselves into murder for generations because their great great grandfather got scammed by a con artist in the 1800s.
As the ending of the first movie and trailers for the second confirm: Le Bail is real, and if you break his rules you explode into a fountain of blood. It’s an amazing schlocky horror effect that’s cemented as an iconic part of the series. You can tell they loved doing the effect every time it shows up this time around.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come picks up right from the ending of the first movie. To the point they re-film the long dolly shot from the ending of the first movie so as to seamlessly continue it into Grace being treated in an ambulance. She wakes up in a hospital to find she forgot to change her emergency contact and her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) has arrived.
The two are immediately kidnapped by ultra-rich people. Mr. Le Bail’s lawyer (Elijah Wood) explains that Grace having survived Hide & Seek triggered an edge case of Le Bail’s deals with the world’s elite. There’s a power vacuum, and the only way to solve it is to run the game a second time. Either someone kills Grace and gets the devil-power that controls the world, or Grace gets it by surviving until dawn. Also she’s handcuffed to her sister so she’ll be slowed down.
There is a world where Newton plays a mewling, panicked doofus while Weaving plays the grizzled survivor from the first movie who has to begrudgingly put up with the newbie. Luckily, we don’t live in that world. Newton plays Faith incredibly convincingly as Grace’s sister. While they are different people with baggage, very early on you’re given enough moments to signal Faith probably would have survived the events of the first movie had she been in Grace’s position.
Who are the rich people?
What a cast. Ready or Not 2 builds on the first movie’s gleeful murder of the most dickish rich-person archetypes imaginable. Just the most irredeemable assholes. Néstor Carbonell shines as a moronic new-money celebrity. A rule of the game, as established in the first movie, is hunters can only use weapons contemporary to when their family signed their deal with Mr. Le Bail. While the others run around with centuries-old edged weapons and early firearms, indicating they’re from old money, Carbonell’s character lugs a massive modern sniper rifle around that he can barely operate.
Elijah Wood perfectly understands his role as the nameless lawyer representing Mr. La Bail. The first movie had to rely on rich people who should know the lore of Mr. La Bail’s deals regurgitating details to each other for the sake of the audience. This time around, Wood acts as a stand-in, alternating between infodumping rules of the game and cautioning hunters away from breaking the rules.
He embodies my favorite kind of Faustian deal in movies: Satan is real, but he’s more of a neutral figure. It’s arguably possible to make a deal with La Bail and change the world for the better while you’re alive. A self-sacrifice to send your soul to Hell in exchange for bettering Earth for everyone else. But, of course, anyone who would make that deal is inherently selfish enough to take the usual path of fame and fortune.
The true stars of the rich folks, though, are the dynamic duo of Ursula and Titus Danforth (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy). The game takes place on Danforth property, and the Danforths have gently massaged the scenario to favor them so they’ll win.
One of the biggest compliments I can give a semi-dorky action-comedy-horror movie with Sarah Michelle Gellar in it as they have restraint. It is abundantly clear the movie is thrilled to have Gellar, but the amount of nods to Buffy the Vampire Slayer are kept relatively light to the point you might only clock the fact she ‘stakes’ a person during a fight sequence.
Fans of The Pitt with very specific fetishes are going to lose their ever-loving minds over Shawn Hatosy’s performance, though. I’ve seen what Dr. Abbot fanfics y’all are cooking on AO3. Footage of Hatosy kicking the shit out of people worse than Robert De Niro in Casino is going to have people hootin’ and hollerin’ in screenings.
The other murderous rich people are largely played for laughs. Hatosy plays Titus as straight evil. An embodiment of a coddled, privileged man with the body strength advantage to act out violent urges with every expectation he’ll get away with it. Titus is a lot of very evil, very real things rolled into one character and Hatosy sells it marvellously.
As cute as I’m being making jokes about people getting horny for Dr. Abbot being evil, this is a performance that convinced me Hatosy is an actor I should be paying more attention to outside of The Pitt.
What about the action?
The core appeal of the action in both Ready or Not movies is the Coen brothers-esque reality of it all. It is both way more difficult and surprisingly easy to kill a human being depending on the circumstances. Throughout the first movie Grace is screaming war cries as she beats the shit out of weak, unassuming rich buffoons (or gets the shit beat out of her by their stronger, oddly loyal staff). The rich folks semi-regularly commit friendly fire through sheer incompetence.
That same attitude is brought to the sequel, but with one incredibly fun twist: if one of the hunters kills another hunter, even by accident, Le Bail considers their deal voided and immediately blood-splodes the offending family. Which means two things:
- The hunters are regularly in a state of panic.
- There are several blood-splosions before the dawn deadline.
Remember the online discourse about the ultra-violence and and intensity of the iconic church scene in Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)? Ready or Not 2 delivers at least a good fraction of that energy any time Grace and/or Faith end up in a close quarters combat situation. At no point are they defenseless damsels, but they do end up in situations where they’re up against someone twice their size or better-equipped.
Should I see it?
Yes! Now! Go get tickets! See it in as full a room as you can. I partook of a lightly-populated screening with about ten other people and still had a blast with the laugh lines and reactions to particularly impactful moments. I can only imagine how fun the vibe is with 200 people all on Ready or Not 2’s wavelength.
Incredibly fun, and one of the best examples of using the framework from an original movie to build a sequel that fixes the problems of the first to make it better. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is not the Terminator 2 of action comedy horror, it’s the Evil Dead 2. I can see a world where the sequel eclipses the first in the zeitgeist.
A rip-roaring good time with barely any lag time or slowdown. Ready or Not 2 is a delightful example of a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be and lives up to that vision. This is the kind of experience that keeps me coming back to theaters every week.
Gavin Gaddis Reviews 