REVIEW:
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come isn’t half as good as the first movie, and that’s a real shame considering the first movie was so absolutely creative and cool. Now, the sequel isn’t bad, but it isn’t all that great either. It doesn’t seem to understand or care about some of the core elements that made the first movie so good. For example, the first movie understood the staples of the one-night trapped in a building genre, such as keeping it all at night, keeping it all in the building, and also having it raining outside. These elements go back to movies like Rashomon and Clue. They can be found in things like Die Hard (not the rain, but all the rest of it,) Identity (set at a motel,) and most recently in They Will Kill You. And yet, Ready or Not 2 bypasses all of that. Maybe they felt like if they kept to those same elements, the movie would be too similar to the first one, but by not including any of them, it actually feels too different.
We’ll get to what they should have done, and how this movie could have been so much better in a few moments, but first let’s start with what they got right. The opening. The movie begins right at the moment where the first movie ended. I absolutely love when movies do that, so that you can seamlessly go from one film to the next. Most sequels don’t do it. Halloween did it, from the first movie straight into Halloween 2. And Daniel Craig’s first two Bond movies did it, with Casino Royale ending by him putting a guy in the trunk of his car, and the sequel picking up with him in a car chase, with the guy still in the trunk of his car. But the truth is Ready or Not 2 maybe does it better than any other movie. That’s because it shows us the end scene of the first movie again, before actually continuing it to show us exactly what happens next. It’s like seeing the end events of the last movie from a new angle.
And speaking of a new angle, right after that, we are with Grace (Samara Weaving) the protagonist of these movies, as she is wheeled off into an ambulance, and we stay in a. closeup of her for the entire sequence, as she is passed out. We just listen to everything that is happening and all conversations between the medics, around her. Experiencing it all from her angle is very cool. These two opening scenes definitely get the movie off to a great start. And then we get a detective coming into the hospital room to question Grace, and it continues to be interesting. How much is she going to tell him, because the more she gets into what really happened (people exploding and satanic rituals and all,) the more crazy she will seem.
Well, the movie doesn’t give us much of the investigation or questioning storyline, because the detective is quickly blown away by an attacker in the hallway, and suddenly we are onto the next game. This is a shame. It’s early on, but it’s already where the movie starts to lose some of its momentum. It’s a situation where they have cool plot threads and characters, and they just waste them, killing them off quickly. First there’s the detective and than there’s Kevin Durand, as the hothead drug addict who storms the hospital halls and is disposed of quickly. And just like that, what could have been a fun and funny character is out of the movie.
This sequel tries to be different from the first movie in a whole lot of ways. The first, and most obvious one is the inclusion of Grace’s sister. Now, there’s not just one of them on the run, but two. What’s next if there’s a third movie, are they going to have a brother, and it will be the three of them on the run? It’s a little too obvious and simple. And the worst part is, it brings in a terrible storyline about how Grace “left” her sister behind when she moved to New York as a young adult, and so the sister felt betrayed and never talked to Grace again. Grace basically went off to college (she was the college age.) And it’s not like she left the sister with an abusive parent. Grace and her sister were in a foster home, and the foster parents were good to them. So this whole storyline is really dumb.
Aside from featuring a sister as the second lead, the other way this movie is especially different is that takes place on a resort and hotel landscape, as opposed to in a mansion. Now this is where the movie really goes wrong. The hotel idea is fine. In fact, it is perfect. That’s exactly how this sequel should have followed up. Move the story from a mansion to a hotel. Only this movie doesn’t really use the hotel. It just uses a couple of rooms on the first floor. We never even go into any of the hotel rooms. And half the movie takes place outside of the hotel, on the golf course or by the main gate, or wherever else. The way to do this movie right would have been to keep it in the hotel on a dark and stormy night, with our characters going floor to floor. And they should have really explored lots of the amenities, including a workout room and a pool.
But none of that is explored here. In fact, the amount of rooms and locations they go to are extremely limited. There’s the golf course, then a ballroom, and a laundry room. And that’s about it. What.a wasted opportunity. We don’t even get the sense of them going to different floors. There’s no point of them setting this movie in a hotel if the hotel is basically going to go unused.
So the new location should be cool, but instead comes off as pretty lousy. In fact, the only time where we get the sense that it is actually a hotel is when Shawn Hatosy (playing one of the two main villains, as part of a brother-sister power team,) grabs a loudspeaker microphone and tells everyone staying in the hotel to get the hell out. But as much as the new location doesn’t work, there’s something that kind of does…the new rules. This movie uses John Wick and its sequels as an inspiration, and what I mean by that is that the first movie introduced us to the world, but it’s the second movie that really fleshes it out. Here we learn about different competing parties and families, and what happens if one member of the family crosses the line and breaks the rules.
The new rules are actually the coolest thing about the movie. They ensure that all family members will explode if one of them kills another competing family member, from a different family. They also talk about how if one family member is eliminated, the next in line needs to take up the mantle and join the hunt. While the new rules are great, they do get confusing toward the end, with a decision of what our main character does that seems to come out of left field.
Basically, the new rules are fun until they’re not. When they apply to the game, they’re great. But then the movie goes in a very different direction, and the rules become more about marriage and loopholes. Suddenly the hunt is over, and that’a a huge mistake. This is a hunt movie. It’s like a monster movie. You don’t kill the monster and then continue on for another 30 minutes afterward.
In fact, the worst thing about this movie is how uninterested it is in having our characters hide. It’s called Ready or Not (a tagline that generally follows and is associated with the words Hide and Seek,) and yet this movie forgets to have our characters hide. When you are being hunted, you put your back against walls, and face the areas where your enemy might appear (like doorways.) The two women in this movie sit in the middle of a ballroom having conversations about their past. They don’t even consider that someone can be taking aim at them with a sniper rifle, without them realizing it.
Now there are definitely some things to like about this movie (continuing where the last left off, setting it all at a hotel,) and then a whole lot to dislike. The action doesn’t feel half as interesting or cool as it did in the first movie. And so this is a classic case of the oiringal film being far better than its sequels. I really wanted to like this movie, but it just has a few too many mistakes.