Seeking another hide
Ready or Not is a movie I enjoyed while constantly wishing it were braver and more coherent. Radio Silence (the collective name for a team that includes credited directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) built a slick, gnarly, occasionally hilarious abduction thriller around a star-making Samara Weaving performance, but never locked onto a real mission statement: like all of Radio Silence‘s movies, it tended to defer to comic mayhem rather than actual storytelling. The film, at least, ended on a hysterical punchline, albeit one that undercut its own class-warfare thesis. I liked it. I still like it, I guess, but it was the moment Radio Silence’s filmmaking ceiling became clear to me.
Seven years later, after two middling Scream outings and the underwhelming vampire mystery Abigail, Radio Silence has turned back to their breakout cult hit with a completely unnecessary sequel. The film picks up right where the first one left off, literally recreating and extending the final shot of the first film. Thus it will be impossible to discuss Ready or Not 2: Here I Come without spoiling the fun finale of Ready or Not 1; proceed accordingly.
A blood-spattered Grace (Weaving) has survived the ordeal of her husband’s family trying to murder her in a game of hide and seek and then exploding like popped blood balloons when an ancient curse came true. She’s rushed to the hospital where her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) meets her. Moments later, they’re both whisked into another single-night game of murderous hide-and-seek, this time with a new lineup of idiotic billionaires hunting them down.
Ready or Not 2 stumbles quite a bit during its opening half, which takes a long time to set up some remarkably convoluted backstory about a cabal of wealthy families vying for a designated “High Seat” that turns you into Capitalism God, or something. The affair is operated by The Lawyer (Elijah Wood). For reasons that never made sense to me, and frankly I don’t much care, this involves hunting Weaving down with Newton in tow.
It doesn’t help that the movie looks rather ugly and dim. Perhaps the original was this visually bleak and I’m misremembering, but Ready or Not 2 feels a step down visually. It is begging for a bright, clear, distinctive color palette. Instead, cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz (returning from Part 1) serves up run-of-the-mill flatness and underlighting.
By the second half, though, the film finds a rhythm. The murderous set pieces pick up and the heart of the film, the strain between two estranged sisters, takes center frame. And while the general scenario is a blatant (and lampshaded) rehash of Part 1, the destinations the story goes to are surprising and fun.
It helps that Weaving, in her almost annual tradition of undercutting her tremendous beauty to get battered around and/or covered in gallons fake viscera, is every bit as ferocious as she was seven years ago. Newton, a scream queen extraordinaire in her own right (see: Freaky), is a well-matched sidekick, her lighter energy beautifully off Weaving’s dry, hardened wit.
The supporting bench buoys the affair, though I missed Adam Brody from Part 1. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s return to an action register, here as a conniving heiress, is a pleasure, though I wish she had gone full Cruel Intentions in her villainy. Wood brings exactly the unctuous bureaucrat energy the part needs, and David Cronenberg turns up for a single scene as a wealthy patriarch named Chester Danforth. Another bright point comes in the production: The film features an early contender for costume of the year in an all-black wedding dress and veil Weaving wears near the film’s ending.
The best scene in the movie, though, is an anti-balletic brawl around the midpoint between two women blinded by pepper spray as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” plays. It’s funny and inventive and exactly the kind of thing I would have asked for in a sequel that has no reason to exist. Let’s at least get silly with it. Ready or Not 2 is not the leap beyond Radio Silence‘s ceiling I’d hoped they might one day take. But it is, surprisingly, about as much fun as the original, though no smarter or sharper.
- Review Series: Radio Silence
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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