Ready Or Not 2 – Here I Come (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
2 days ago
4 min read

READY OR NOT 2 – HERE I COME (2026)

Starring Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood, Néstor Carbonell, Kevin Durand, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, Nadeem Umar-Khitab, Juan Pablo Romero, Masa Lizdek, Maia Jae, Daniel Beirne, Antony Hall, Kara Wooten, Grant Nickalls, Kristel Fernandes, Nathan Lam and Dina Pino.

Screenplay by Guy Busick & R. Christopher Murphy.

Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.

Distributed by Searchlight Pictures. 108 minutes. Rated R.

I rather liked the 2019 mystery pastiche Ready or Not when it came out. And yet, seven years later, I have to wonder who has really been waiting for this sequel. After all, Ready or Not was part of the new hip deconstruction of the classic parlor mystery, much like Knives Out, which came out the same year. (In fact, Ready or Not came out a few months before Knives Out did.) However, in the time since then, Knives Out has spawned two sequels while Ready or Not has been pretty much forgotten.

Even by me, and I was a fan of the original. Still, in the seven years since I originally saw it, I’d pretty much forgotten the film. And, rewatching it last weekend to remind me of the original before seeing the sequel, I was again swept into the fun of the film, an odd merging of Agatha Christie, “The Most Dangerous Game,” with a dollop of Rosemary’s Baby and probably a bit too much blood spattering effects in the last half hour.

Well, there is twice as much mayhem in Ready or Not 2 – Here I Come, and yet the movie is probably only about half as much fun. They try to ratchet up everything here, and honestly, they overdo it. Let’s face it, it’s never easy to out-gross a movie in which many of the villains spontaneously combust into an explosion of blood, so this movie’s overreliance on big, violent splatter effects can tend to blunt the best aspects of the series. After all, how many times can you go back to the old spontaneous combustion gag? It turns out here, pretty often.

In fact, even the basic premise feels off. Grace – the bride from the first movie – survived a night of constant danger and great pain and danger. She finally makes it through all of the threats piled upon her. And by surviving the night, supposedly she was spared and had been given the fortune of her late in-laws.

The new movie starts right after the last film ends. And it’s only slightly noticeable that Samara Weaving, the actress playing the only character to survive the first film, has aged seven years in that time. Okay, we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she went through A LOT that night.

Anyway, in this sequel’s mythology (which seems more complicated and muddled than the first film’s lore), in surviving, she started a power vacuum in the five Satanist families which all have made the same deal with the devil as the first night’s family. So Grace and her estranged kid sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who happens to be in the hospital because she was big sis’s “in case of emergency” contact, are kidnapped, taken to a large country club estate and forced to survive the night – AGAIN – while members of four other families hunt them.

I’m sorry, even in a film about morally bankrupt Satanists, that feels a bit like piling on. She won the contest and was told that in the end she would be safe. Why force her to do a do-over?

In fact, the only truly interesting new character, other than the sister, is Elijah Wood as the lawyer who works for the demonic overlord of this world. The lawyer is not nearly as cavalier as the millionaire hunters here, and he is even only slightly grudgingly determined to play completely by the extremely complex rules that govern the competition to see which family can kill the bride first.

The hunters are much more basic rich stereotypes. There are the hotel heiress and her slightly psychotic brother (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy). There are the passionate but clumsy Latin businessman and his daughter, who is the jealous former fiancée of Grace’s late husband (Nestor Carbonell and Maia Jae). There is the enthusiastic but not very competent (or overly brave) Indian brothers (Varun Saranga and Nadeem Umar-Khitab). Also the Asian businesswoman and her video-game obsessed son (Olivia Cheng and Antony Hall) who come to Grace with a possible loophole.

Ready or Not 2 – Here I Come ends up having the basic problem I mentioned before. It is fitfully extremely fun, but really why does it need to exist? It does not improve on the original one, it just seems a bit unnecessary. And if the first one, which I enjoyed much more, was so completely unmemorable, what about this lesser sequel is going to change that issue?

Jay S. Jacobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jczr0KCloXk