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The thing that made Ready or Not such an unexpected hit (which earned $57m worldwide against its $6m budget) was its simplicity and originality.
The 2019 horror comedy followed a bride who marries into a rich family and discovers that their obscene wealth comes with a pact with the devil.
The details of the pact? Not relevant, with the exception of the fact that, on her wedding night, she must play a game. If it’s hide and seek, they hunt her like an animal until dawn. Survive, or be sacrificed to the family’s demonic benefactor.
It was zany, gory, clean in its concept, and thrillingly different.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come keeps the blood, the chaos, and the satire, but unfortunately loses that elegant simplicity in the process.
Picking up immediately after the first film, we rejoin Grace (Samara Weaving), still in her now-iconic blood-soaked wedding dress and yellow Converse, sitting shell-shocked on the steps of the smouldering Le Domas mansion, as the sole survivor of a game that wiped out an entire family.
She barely has time to light a cigarette before she’s pulled into the next phase of the nightmare.
There’s a brief detour as Grace is taken to hospital and questioned by a baffled detective — a glimpse at what it might actually mean to survive a horror movie massacre that defies all logic.
But writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy aren’t interested in lingering there. Instead, they rush us back into the game.
And this time, the stakes of the game are… everything. By surviving the first film, Grace has apparently triggered a global power vacuum among multiple Satan-worshipping dynasties.
Enter Elijah Wood as a smirking ‘lawyer’ figure, tasked with explaining — at length — that whichever family kills Grace before dawn will take control of the infernal empire.
It’s here that the sequel begins to suffocate under its own mythology.
Scenes of exposition land like an older sibling explaining the rules to a complicated board game, when you voted for family movie night.
The original’s razor-sharp premise becomes tangled in lore, hierarchies, and competing bloodlines, draining tension from what should feel immediate and dangerous.
Still, when the film stops explaining itself and just lets chaos reign, it works.
The action is as gleefully grotesque as ever, with inventive kills and splatter that feel both ridiculous and wince-inducing.
One particularly grim death involving a washing machine’s sanitizing cycle is as disgusting as it is a whole lot of spooky fun.
There’s also a visually sumptuous satanic wedding sequence — complete with a black gown and an animal sacrifice pit — that hints at a bolder, stranger film lurking underneath.
And, of course, Weaving remains the franchise’s secret weapon.
She’s ferociously watchable, but the script gives her frustratingly little to do beyond survive (again) and fixate on getting a cigarette — a running gag that quickly drifts into the territory of ‘don’t talk to me before coffee’ novelty T-shirt humour.
Where the first film let her transform from passive to empowered, here she often feels stuck — even visually, still wearing the same now-familiar dress as in the first film. What once felt iconic now borders on repetitive.
Kathryn Newton fares better as estranged sister Faith, bringing wit and a lived-in chemistry to their dynamic.
When the film leans into their relationship, it finds something surprisingly satisfying — even if their conflicts sometimes feel underwritten, like a vague approximation of how sisters are supposed to argue rather than something fully realised.
Elsewhere, the ensemble is a mixed bag.
Sarah Michelle Gellar is reliably sharp as Ursula Danforth, while Shawn Hatosy is genuinely unsettling as her grotesque, man-child brother — a villain who feels uncomfortably of the moment in his blend of insecurity, chauvinism, and volatility.
His performance is so convincingly unpleasant that a prolonged sequence of violence against Newton becomes tonally jarring, tipping the film briefly into something far less fun — and far more serious — than it seems equipped to handle.
Even Elijah Wood, clearly enjoying himself, leaves you wondering quite why he’s here at all. Please, Mr. Frodo, go back to the Shire.
There are flashes of sharp satire – particularly in its portrayal of absurdly powerful elites squabbling over demonic succession – but the film never quite lands on what it wants to say beyond the broad (if still satisfying) notion that the ultra-rich are monstrous.
Still, there’s a truly zany scene where Grace fights an opponent who is also wearing a wedding dress, and it’s such a good time that it’s easy not to care how we arrived at the moment.
Ultimately, Ready or Not 2 doubles down on everything that made the original work — the gore, the humour, the class commentary — but in expanding its world, it dilutes its impact.
As a result, the stakes feel strangely diminished, the tension less immediate, and the thrills less surprising. It’s still a good time — and fans of the original will find plenty to enjoy — with enough blood, bite, and bravado to carry it along.
But in trying to scale the game up while keeping everything else largely the same, it overcomplicates itself without ever really advancing the story.
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