Ready or Not 2: Here I Come knows exactly why its predecessor was a hit. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s sequel to their 2019 horror, which earned $57m worldwide against its $6m budget, barely gives Grace (Samara Weaving) time to finish her cigarette before she’s knocked back into action. Sat outside the smouldering ruins of her husband’s family estate as the ambulances roll in – they chose to play a deadly game of hide and seek on her wedding night, so she blew them all up – she’s swiftly carted off to hospital, stripped down and patched up, all so she can put right back on the shredded and bloodied remains of her bridal gown for round two.
Her massacre of the Le Domas clan has left a power vacuum within the satanic one per cent, which can only apparently be solved with more deadly hide and seek. Rinse and repeat. It’s not original, but it still works. Horror is the rare genre where you can simply reload the gun and fire off a few new rounds. And, this time, the bullets are of a particularly fine make: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kathryn Newton, Elijah Wood, The Pitt’s Shawn Hatosy, and, unexpectedly, The Fly director David Cronenberg all make an appearance.
Grace can at least now rely on the help of her estranged sister Faith (Newton). Writers Guy Busick and R Christopher Murphy attempt to make their sequel about familial loyalty, the question of whether blood really is thicker than water, as Grace and Faith spend half the runtime bickering over who abandoned who. Meanwhile, brother-and-sister act Ursula (Gellar) and Titus Danforth (Hatosy) have been tasked by their imperious father (Cronenberg) to kill Grace and win the High Seat, which would in turn essentially hand them the keys to the world. But if they win, who actually wears the crown? Daddy didn’t bother to explain that one.
Gellar’s always at her best when she’s able to slink back into the venomous skin of Cruel Intentions’s Kathryn Merteuil, and Wood has some fun with the placid, perma-smile of a lawyer tasked by the literal devil to explain the game’s rules. And, boy, are there a lot of rules to explain, as the film manoeuvres itself to introduce its cabal of new assailants, chiefly the sniper-trained Ignacio El Caido (Néstor Carbonell), tycoon Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), and party boy Viraj Rajan (Nadeem Umar-Khitab).
More subclauses are required to explain why Grace and Faith end up bathed in blood every other scene. Ready or Not 2 is exhaustingly attached to any image from the first film it deems “iconic”, yet the original was at least early to the “eat the rich” trend, and still feels more emotionally honest than a lot of what came after (think Anya Taylor-Joy smugly chowing down on her cheeseburger at the end of The Menu).
Here, it’s not a matter of vengeance against the elite but survival. And Weaving bellows and grunts like a wounded creature trying to get the boot off their back. While the world around her gets increasingly silly – to the film’s credit, the excess is usually quite funny, and there’s an inspired sequence involving mutual pepper spraying – Grace still stands at the centre with the kind of demented determination that recalls Marilyn Burns’s Sally Hardesty laughing her head off as the truck drives away at the end of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). It’s the same game, but it’s easy to root for the same winner.
Dir: Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin. Stars: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood. Cert 15, 108 minutes.
‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’ is in cinemas from 20 March
