For Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving), the central character in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, the six-year-in-the-making sequel to Ready or Not, mere seconds have passed since we last saw her, “winning” a life-or-death game of Hide and Seek against her now expired in-laws, including her husband. Bloodied, beaten, but far from broken, Grace just wants to kick back with a cigarette while she watches her ex-in-laws’ compound burn to the ground.
Unfortunately for Grace, but fortunately for fans ofMatt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s (Scream 5-6, Abigail, Southbound) 2019 film, Ready or Not, the exclusive club of Satanists who rule the world isn’t done with her. As the lone survivor of the otherwise defunct Le Domas family, she’s inherited not just their seat on the High Council that rules the world, she’s also next in line for the so-called High Seat — an unsubtle nod to the John Wick series and the lore-expanding sequels — and the other families on said High Council won’t rest until they can claim the High Seat or die, or rather spontaneously combust, trying.
Where Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy’s original screenplay dropped the newly married Grace, and with Grace, the audience, straight into the Le Domas family drama and their pact with a certain Mr. Le Bail (Satan himself), the sequel winds and wends through a leaden, exposition-heavy first act led by a literal Devil’s Advocate (Elijah Wood). In over-meticulous detail, the devil’s lawyer drops the rules on a captive audience of two, a returning Grace, unceremoniously kidnapped from a local hospital along with her estranged sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton).
Despite their years-long estrangement, Grace and Faith have to fight together to survive until the next dawn, setting up several on-again, off-again arguments that tend to erupt at the exact wrong moment, a repeating plot element that eventually becomes tiresome. Meant to explain their periodic breaks from each other’s company, their estrangement feels underdeveloped at best, an all-too-obvious plot device meant to increase their vulnerability at worst. Only Weaving and Newton, credibly essaying biological sisters turned Satanic cult bashers, save Ready or Not 2: Here I Come from slipping into second- or even third-tier mediocrity.
Grace and Faith not only have just one family, but several multi-member families to defeat and or evade until the sun rises the next day. If they survive, Grace gets the High Seat on the High Council, and with it, a chance to rule the world as she sits fit. A long afternoon, followed by a long night, of Grace and Faith’s souls, however, means the odds of survival have decreased while the odds of even more bloody, bruising violence, most, if not all, inflicted on Grace and Faith as they combat one sociopathic Satanist after another, have increased exponentially. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett push that violence right up to the edge of sadomasochism and, at least for some, cross over.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come sets the MacCaullay sisters up against twins, Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), heirs to the Danforth fortune, power, and influence, the El Caído family led by Ignacio (Néstor Carbonell), Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), a billionaire Chinese businesswoman, and the Rajan clan, Madhu (Varun Saranga), Viraj (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), and Martina (Masa Lizdek). A family patriarch or matriarch might have sold their souls, including the entire bloodline down to the last living descendant, to the Devil long ago, but they’re all just eager to play the new game and win even more power than they already possess, like the ability to start and/or end wars with a simple phone call on a whim, a power explicitly depicted via a brief, first-act scene featuring the Danforth patriarch, Chester (David Cronenberg), on his literal deathbed.
Missing the leanness, if not the meanness, of the original, Ready or Not 2: Here I Come certainly doesn’t shortchange horror audiences eager to revisit the film’s splatter-filled goodness. Characters die in all manner of horrific ways, but more often than not, their deaths — or rather their dying — leave Grace and/or Faith covered in bucketfuls of blood. (Shout out to the makeup team, specifically continuity supervisors.)
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come brings back Grace’s elegantly blood-splattered dress and yellow Converse sneakers, less out of necessity than out of a nostalgic desire to recreate the memories of the first film’s memorable excesses. What it can’t bring back, though, is that rush of adrenaline that comes from experiencing a horror-comedy like the original for the first time. The stakes, along with the body count, may be higher, twice the number of protagonists (Grace and Faith), but that borderline transgressive pleasure, the over-indulgent, sociopathic rich receiving a much-deserved comeuppance, has been halved, not doubled.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opens theatrically on Friday, March 20th, via Searchlight Pictures.
