Flasz On Film

The 2019 Ready or Not ended with Grace (Samara Weaving) limping towards the camera having survived a deadly game of hide and seek, a familial battle royale and a failed satanic ritual. A burning mansion behind her, her bridal gown torn to shreds and drenched in blood. She sat down and lit up a cigarette while the police arrived at the scene and asked what happened. All she said before the movie cut to black was “In-laws.”

But this was not the end of her story as Ready or Not 2: Here I Come picks up exactly when the previous movie finished and sees Grace pass out, transferred to an ambulance and resuscitated. She wakes up in a hospital visited upon by a police detective suggesting that she might go to jail for murdering her in-laws (who had exploded in flurries of blood and gore after failing to sacrifice her to their demonic benefactor), followed also by her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton). However, it also turns out that dispatching a powerful family most certainly didn’t go unnoticed in the billionaire Satan-worshiping circles as the two are immediately kidnapped and thrust back into a deadly game of survival against a host of point-one-percenters (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy and others) who believe that killing Grace is their golden ticket to world domination. Or something.

This immediately sets the movie as an exercise in more of the same. Make no mistake—it is. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come doesn’t even hide its own intentions in this regard. If anything, the movie openly disposes with the element of suspense or surprise that accompanied its predecessor while also acknowledging that in this case there’s not much one can do to lean into the horror element of what was originally packaged as a satirical black comedy survival horror. Instead, all remaining constituent elements are appropriately elevated to compensate. This movie is therefore more heightened, more inclined towards its own high-concept satire and consequently more ridiculous as an overall experience.

The one question that remains is if it still worth watching and the answer is yes. With caveats and qualifications.

While there is absolutely no debate that the previous movie is superior and that even in the space of modern action-slanted horror there are more interesting films to choose over this, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come has two aces up its sleeve that make this otherwise quite workaday exercise in genre entertainment worthwhile. The first one is the biggest: Samara Weaving. There is no doubt in my mind that the filmmakers (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett who have also directed Abigail, Scream 5 and Scream 6) understood in 2019 that what they were dealing with while pointing their camera at Samara Weaving was strong Scream Queen potential. There was just something palpable and exhilarating about hanging onto Grace’s shoulder seven years ago as she transitioned in real time from a would-be victim to a blood-soaked avenging angel who emerged bruised and scarred at the end of it all. And in here her journey continues in the way Sarah Connor changed from a victim-turned-heroine to a survivalist prepper between The Terminator and T2: Grace is now a full-blown badass who’s just as fun to watch. And it doesn’t matter that the movie as it is is not scary at all or that it tries supremely hard to be funny in places where doing so serves only to undermine its satirical themes. Weaving’s character simply owns the screen, which the filmmakers make great use of. She’s hyper-stylized and occasionally supernatural in a way that comic book antiheroes tend to be.

Finally, there’s what I call the “bonkersness” of the spectacle which seems particularly what these two filmmakers gravitate towards whenever they are not bound by adherence to franchise integrity. In their Scream movies they still found ways to stay light on their feet and turn what otherwise would have registered as truly gruesome hard-R violent genre catharsis as fun to watch. Here, however, and in Abigail they show just how fun it is to soak the set in fake blood and turn everything into a farce full of exploding bodies. Although this decision to ramp up the saturation and contrast on the violence and black comedy with respect to the original movie disarms somewhat its social commentary, the end result is a fun, playful and tactile experience. At the end of the day, we’re not here to read into the thematic nuance of how the story comments on class or how it suggests that billionaires are all satanists. We’ve seen it before and we acknowledge this as a base for the entertainment to build on. And this is especially true in the post-Parasite world that has conditioned viewers to read basic metaphors (and even more complex ones too) and to be able to freely map social commentary onto genre stories.

Therefore, it’s totally fine for a movie with a colon in the title that also happens to follow a largely successful survival horror led by a charismatic modern scream queen to be kinda-sorta braindead. The adrenaline release accompanying the notion of watching loads of people getting bruised, rich assholes getting their comeuppance and then everything converging at a black mass that turns into a fountain of fake blood (some of which was unfortunately digitally created and it shows) is enough to pay for the ticket. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is an in-and-out genre trifle. A little cinematic caprice that knows that its mission is merely two-fold: to fill ninety minutes with bloody action seasoned with satirical zest and to give Samara Weaving enough screen time to cement her status as one of the modern horror icons, a title she most certainly deserves.