Grace may be done with the Le Domas family, but the family is nowhere near done with her in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, the long-awaited sequel to 2019’s surprise critical hit directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. While this iteration of the film manages to retain some of the original’s fun, it finds itself mired in repetition in spite of an expanded world and a host of fun supporting characters.
When we last left Grace Le Domas née McCaulley (Samara Weaving), she’d survived a deadly night of hide and seek conducted by the Lo Domas family, board game magnates who’d amassed a fortune thanks to a deal with Mr. Le Bail (aka, The Devil). We open on Grace smoking a well-deserved cigarette on the steps of the Le Domas mansion, but soon she succumbs to shock, landing her in the hospital (and handcuffs).
Meanwhile, Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg) has learned of the demise of the Le Domas family and puts into motion a follow-up game meant to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat by assembling a group of families who’ve made similar Faustian deals. The goal: capture Grace, defeat her in a larger game of hide and seek, and return Le Bail’s power to the ruling class where it always belonged.
This time Grace is reluctantly joined by her estranged sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton, Lisa Frankenstein), who holds the unfortunate position of being Grace’s emergency contact. Together they must evade the deadly intentions of four deadly families as they seek to eliminate her from atop Satan’s leaderboard and continue the income disparity-based hegemony they’ve always enjoyed and relied upon.
While it’s not exactly the same story as its predecessor, Ready or Not 2 doesn’t stray very far from the path laid out for it seven years ago. Unfortunately, this winds up being the film’s biggest hang-up, an unwillingness to explore the creative universe opened up by a Satanic figurehead obsessed with games of chance and skill. By affixing the story to hide and seek – an element seemingly deemed necessary by the title – Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett (along with returning screenwriters Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy) have limited options as far as where the world can take them.
There are, of course, ways to mitigate the sameness of a return to this world, new characters, new twists, and – this being a horror film – new kills. Sadly, as quickly as these newish elements are deployed, they are undercut by predictable plotting, a winking camera, and interesting characters dispatched too soon and without fanfare. Not even Samara Weaving, a heroine of genre cinema if there ever was one, can overpower the monotony that plagues this uninspired sequel.
Along with Newton, whose performance as Faith falls uncharacteristically flat in key moments, Ready or Not 2 introduces a host of fresh meat for the grinder, very few of whom are given the opportunity to really shine. Elijah Wood shows up as The Lawyer, a sort of game master in charge of dispensing exposition and increasingly complex rules for what shout be a simple gang. The four families are led by pragmatic Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), fiery Latino Ignacio El Caído (Nestor Carbonell), the Danforth twins Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), and the blustery Madhu Rajan (Varun Saranga), and their assorted siblings and children.
While it is clear from early on that the Danforths are going to be the focus – and likely the ultimate survivors – of this cruel game, they aren’t always the most interesting. The problem is that the film seems to enjoy introducing compelling characters simply to have them deliver expository dialogue and then be immediately dispatched. Even when a character appears with a captivating reason to hold animus toward Grace, like say, a jilted former fiancée, she gets a fun fight sequence followed by a death that is less than she deserves.
This is a constant irritant throughout the film, characters and plot mechanics are set in motion only to be resolved in the most perfunctory ways. On top of that, the film relies too much on goodwill earned by its predecessor that this version has not yet earned itself. The gleeful surprise exploding deaths that capped Ready or Not were a shocking, fun way to end a brutal night. In this film we know the explosions are coming, and the film uses them as jokes, rather than the shocks they should be. When we know a pop is coming, the camera lingers, as if to let us know that it knows what’s coming, but the film shouldn’t be in on its own joke, it makes no attempt to fake out the audience, and that’s just boring.
While Ready or Not 2 follows up on the first film’s overall theme of a woman desperate for family, in this case it is delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Yes, there are a couple of fun surprises, but too much of the plotting and action feels rote to make this a worthy follow-up. Try though she might, even the mighty Samara Weaving cannot support a film with this much missed opportunity. Maybe Ready or Not 2 should’ve stayed in hiding a little bit longer, perhaps until it came up with a way to grab the audience that we hadn’t seen before. As it stands, I can see myself revisiting the first chapter a dozen times before I go back to this one.