There's no part of that title that I'm comfortable with
dirs: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillet
2026
Did we… did we really need another go? Didn’t she suffer enough in the first flick?
The success of the first Ready or Not I guess necessitated a sequel, but I can’t imagine a lot of people went to see it? Must be less than went to see the original.
It can’t offer anything new, can it? The first flick had the main character played by Samara Weaving running around a mansion as terrible people try to kill her lest the devil kill them too. This “new” flick picks up the next day, as a bunch of terrible people kidnap her and her sister (Kathryn Newton), and let her run around a mansion as they try to kill her, for either control of the world or to not explode.
To say it’s more of the same implies that I don’t get that its virtue, as a sequel, is an endless array of callbacks to the original film.
No. This new flick has so much more to offer. It has two estranged siblings figuring out their relationship and saying “I’m sorry” eventually but only after bickering endlessly as the forces of Satan try to kill them both.
Samara Weaving does what she did last time, so no one will be surprised. She is the Final Girl in a blood-blackened wedding gown, determined to get a smoke and kill people in order to save her and her sister. She alternates between absolute psychotic and feral, and forgetting that she’s a badass and occasionally screaming like a little boy with a skinned knee, in order to not outpace the script, which is a pretty dumb one.
That this flick spends an eternity with her character trying to find a phone to call the cops exhausts me. It’s almost like, despite her experiences a day ago, she has forgotten almost everything in the reset, and thinks the cops would care if the richest people on the planet who made numerous deals with the actual devil were hunting two white women at a prestigious estate.
In order to indicate just how powerful these people are, they show the patriarch of the Danforth clan (played by Canadian national treasure David Cronenberg) making a phonecall in order to get two sides of an intractable conflict to stop fighting immediately. Seconds later one of the televisions he’s watching changes its chyron to read “war over”.
Wow, he’s like Rupert Murdoch or something! And he has two shitty kids who want to take over from him, but it’s not enough to want something, you’ve got to earn it (somewhat) by killing some blonde woman.
Those siblings are played by Sarah Michelle Geller and Shawn Hatosy. Probably no-one outside of fans of The Pitt would know who Shawn Hatosy is, playing an entitled sociopathic rich arsehole here, no surprise, but Geller? Buffy? I haven’t seen her in anything in decades.
And of course, yes, I was thoroughly disappointed. She sparked zero joy, glad as I was to see her again. There was no life, no verve to the character, that of an Ivanka-like daughter of a powerful Satan-enhanced man but with somehow less personality, and very little presence.
Wondering which of these awful siblings would triumph before Grace kills them was not that interesting, because given the template they were forced to follow, all of them have to die so Grace and Faith don’t have to.
The big ‘surprise’ at the end of the first flick was that the animating reason for all the carnage, in a flick that had nothing supernatural in it up to that point, was actually ‘real’, and that the Le Domas family had a binding contract with the devil that would see them get all explodey if they didn’t off the newcomer, blissful newly-wed Grace. That all of those appalling rich people died in the end, even if Grace didn’t have to kill them directly, was a special bonus.
She knows, except when she forgets, that all she needs to do is survive until dawn, though it’s more fun to kill some annoying people along the way.
One of the people who really, REALLY wants to kill her is someone who was previously engaged to Grace’s former fiancé (who tried to hunt her down, like the rest of his shitty clan). Now, knowing as we do that the only reason that jerk tried to marry her was to kill her, since that angry lady is also a devil worshipper, she gets that she would have been hunted instead, doesn’t she?
Right? Instead she’s really angry, and keeps trying to use rocket launchers to kill Grace, which is slightly overkill.
I was really amused early on when some jerk played by Canada’s greatest export Kevin Durand tries to pre-emptively kill Grace with knives when she’s still in hospital recovering from what the other family tried to do to her, but because of that not only does he explode, but everyone related to him, his bloodline, also explodes, wherever they might be, through no fault of their own (other than being devil worshippers).
A lot of people explode like the bags of blood they mostly are, but they generally do it, when it happens near our protagonist and her sister, such that a whole heap of fluids spray onto them both. Conservative estimate: It happens five times, maybe? Two or three times and you have a motif, a reoccurring callback. Five times and I think it’s medically known as a fetish on the part of the filmmakers.
Because there was a ‘famous’ marketing image of Samara Weaving wearing a wedding dress with an ammo bandoleer and a shotgun, there has to be a bit in this flick where she finally finds a shotgun and greets it with deep affection like it’s a long lost friend. Mind you the adventures of the first flick from 2019 from her perspective happened yesterday. So two days in a row she finds a shotgun somewhere. What are the odds, huh.
It doesn’t even really end up mattering, because what really matters in these flicks is good lawyering. A lawyer who represents Le Bail’s earthly interests, Le Bail being the play on demonic names alternative name for The Devil!, or Belial, tries to make sure everyone conforms with the laws and bylaws set out in a large tome. Le Bail loves two things: strict adherence to legal responsibilities and lots and lots of goat sacrifices. Can’t get enough of them.
That lawyer is charmingly played by Elijah Wood. Yes, Frodo himself. He still looks young, though, so maybe there is some actual deal with some devil involved. His character doesn’t seem to have any particular bias against Grace, but he’s not there to help either. He’s just there to make sure everyone adheres to the rules and has a good time (before they die).
That Grace and her sister survive is less than miraculous and more a function of the format. Despite the fact that this flick didn’t make money, I have no doubt they’re going to make a third one, which will gain follow on almost immediately after the events of this flick, and have even more jerks trying to off Grace, Faith, the goat they rescued, and probably a gay cousin that was never mentioned in the first two flicks but will play some crucial role in the third, which will be called Ready or Not, We’ve Run Out of Ideas and AI Didn’t Come Up With Anything Workable, where an assortment of techbros and broligarchs hunt down Our Heroes else they lose favour with the dark lord who fronted them their initial financing in the first place that made them the bug eyed salamanders ruling Silicone Valley. Something something people will get shot and stabbed and maybe AI will kill some service industry types along the way.
And Samara Weaving will tower over all of them, shotgun in hand, finding another contrived reason why she has to put on that bloody wedding dress yet again.
Is she good in the role? I have no idea what she’s like as an actor, because I’ve only seen her in these flicks, and that’s like judging a person based on that time you saw them fall down some stairs twice. She’s fine as a scream queen / Final Girl, but there’s got to be more to her career than this, I hope.
As for the sister, well, she’s only employed to be annoying, like all people’s younger siblings. She’s probably fine in other things, but she’s only here to be a damsel in distress to pressure Grace to do things that are dumb and counterproductive, but they do prove her deep love for what’s-her-name.
I’m sure the next one will be really great!
6 times if something works one time, keep doing it over and over again out of 10
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“I'm really not used to people combusting all over me.” – some things don’t get easier with time and repetition - Ready or Not Here I Come
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