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To give 2019’s grating comedy horror Ready or Not some reluctant credit, it did arrive before Trump-era eat-the-rich became an entire, increasingly exhausting subgenre in itself. The film, about a woman finding out her new husband’s wealthy family members are game-playing devil-worshippers, was clearly indebted to/inspired by Get Out, but it landed before The Menu, Blink Twice, Triangle of Sadness, The Hunt, Knives Out, Infinity Pool, Opus and the many, many others, a medal for speed if not much else.
The follow-up has then taken a surprising amount of time, mostly due to the team behind it (directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) being busy with the rebooted Scream franchise as well as toothless vampire dud Abigail, but also one imagines because of the difficulties in extending a film in which everyone, bar final girl, had spontaneously combusted at the end. In a world where both horror and superhero franchises have increasingly started to resemble daytime soaps in their absurd, no-rules-apply plotting (not dead, all a dream, different universe, etc), Ready or Not 2: Here I Come was still inevitable regardless of logic. What’s odd given the seven-year gap is that the second film takes place directly after the first, a la Halloween II, with heroine Grace, played by Samara Weaving, looking noticeably, understandably different.
She is whisked from scene of the averted sacrifice to hospital but faced with a cascade of whos, whats and whys from a baffled detective. It is always interesting to play with the question of what would actually happen to the survivor of a horror movie massacre that defies reasoning (Jordan Peele’s original ending of Get Out provided one grimly realistic answer) but returning writers Guy Busick and R Christopher Murphy are eager to get us back to the action. This time, Grace has to play hide-and-seek with estranged sister Faith (Abigail survivor Kathryn Newton) and faces multiple enemies from multiple families. In scenes suffocated by exposition, like someone reading the rules to a game you no longer want to play, Elijah Wood’s lawyer explains that by Grace surviving the previous game of hide-and-seek and killing an entire bloodline, she’s now set off a larger battle for global supremacy and each powerful Satanic family head must try to kill her before dawn to sit at the head of the table.
Bigger might be better when it comes to some of the goofier aspects of a B-movie sequel like this with a marked budget increase allowing for some more inventively eye-catching gore (death by industrial washing machine being a standout) but not with the expansion of a mythology that edges the film into the terminology-stuffed world of YA fantasy. The stakes are now ridiculously MCU-level high (control of the planet!) and the film feels like less of a horror and more of an action comedy, something closer to a John Wick wannabe (a franchise that became similarly convoluted 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 its centre, there’s also an attempt to supersize our investment. Yet like the original, it is a film more interested in creating merchandisable Funko Pops than actual characters, obsessing over imagery that doggedly insists its icon-worthy status over people we ever really care about. The sisters talk to each other like info-dump 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 tries gamely to sell it, Weaving is both high volume but low wattage. Like the film around her she is loud but ineffective.
It’s not like she has that much to work with anyway, her final girl a hard-to-root-for junk pile of knowing eye-rolls, generic trademarks (she likes a cigarette!) and Halloween costume-first iconography (wedding dress but blood) that was never even earned in the first film. There is more fun to be had from the millennial-aimed casting around her, Wood joined by his Faculty co-star Shawn Hatosy and ex-vampire slayer Sarah Michelle Gellar, all of whom having almost enough of a good time for it to bleed out into the audience. But it’s all too familiar not just in its now rather played out “rich people suck” messaging (they do, but still!) or its many influences (it is John Wick but also R-rated Hunger Games which was itself just PG-13 Battle Royale) but in its smug, SXSW-primed tone (it did indeed premiere at the genre-first Austin festival). It is the “well, that just happened” dialogue, most jokes involving shouting, swearing, or shouting and swearing and then the inevitable fight scene set to a discordant 80s soft rock ballad (Total Eclipse of the Heart, natch). It’s all too clumsily calculated to deliver the raucous two-drinks-in blast it so desperately wants us to have and in a year that’s already given us better, bolder B-movie examples than usual (Sam Raimi’s Send Help and monkey-gone-mad horror Primate), it creaks that much louder. It is film-making far too in love with itself to care if you love it too.
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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is out in Australian cinemas now and in the US and UK on 20 March
