One Thing I Like About Ready or Not 2

To be clear: it’s not just that Ready or Not didn’t need a sequel; the thing that I liked most about it was that it seemed so defiantly anti-sequel. It was this weird, completely self-contained one-off, so adamantly its own thing that it felt like a relief from Hollywood’s worst tendencies to try and make everything a franchise.

It had just enough lore and world-building to support this one clever story, and it gave that story an explosive finale that seemed to definitively state The End. Like a crew that spent months building an elaborate miniature just for the sake of blowing it up at the end as spectacularly as possible. Plus, like Abigail, it had a perfect ending line.

The only points in favor of continuing it: the title, which practically begs for a sequel called Here I Come, and the fact that the first movie cast someone completely perfect for the lead role.

Before the movie, I watched an interview with Samara Weaving on the Dead Meat podcast. There were two highlights: one was her saying that she knew she was cut out for weird genre movies when she discovered that she could “scream like a goat.”

The other was describing the meticulous process the make-up, effects, and editing crew took in order to make Ready or Not 2: Here I Come pick up exactly from the final moment of the first movie. To the point that I couldn’t see exactly where the transition into new footage happened, and I would’ve otherwise just assumed that it was something they filmed as part of the original, just in case it ever went to sequel.

It made me go into this movie more receptive than I would’ve been otherwise. If this had been just an obligatory sequel, there are much, much easier ways they could’ve picked up the story. They could’ve simply jumped forward in time a few hours or a day, and it would’ve worked just as well. Deliberately picking up right after the first movie feels not like a necessity but a stunt.

And even a bit self-consciously a stunt. We see our protagonist Grace being carried into an ambulance, and then the EMTs giving chest compression and using a defibrillator to revive her. As if it’s slyly saying, “Yes, we know her story is over. We’re forcing her back to life and deliberately putting her through another round of this all over again.”

The rest of the set-up is similarly contrived, to the point of making me laugh at how far they were going to justify it. They have to get her back into that crusty, bloody dress, and they have to get her hair and face covered in blood again as quickly as possible. In less capable hands, I would’ve been rolling my eyes. Here, it feels more like a playful “Here’s your sequel! Choke on it!”

To me, it was a confident assertion that the filmmakers — Radio Silence, working with many of the team from the first movie — were working with a Scream-like awareness of the requirements of a genre movie and the sequel to a genre movie, and wanted to acknowledge that without ever being as explicitly self-referential as the Scream franchise.

One of the most surprising things to me was how they used the most memorable aspect of the first movie’s explosive finale. I was convinced that they’d used up any potential to make that surprising or interesting; much like the house that was the setting for the first movie, they’d burned through it and left it destroyed. But here, they recognize that it’s no longer shocking or surprising, so they start to play with the idea of the audience expecting it to happen.

So I was pretty quickly won over. If they’re going to insist on making a sequel, they made (mostly) the right choices. Pretty great casting, bringing back their favorites like Kathryn Newton and Kevin Durand, plus a mix of celebrity stunt casting and memorable character actors. It felt a little bit like Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, where you could tell he just really wanted to spend more time in that world with that crew and those performers.

That really came through for me in a scene pretty early in the “game,” in which sisters Grace and Faith are in the process of killing one of their pursuers. Samara Weaving has a range of expressions that realistically should be impossible for any actor to get across: I’m still in shock; This is horrific; Good for us, we got ‘im; This is kind of awkward; Has it been long enough?; This is going to be gross, isn’t it? I can totally imagine having made a movie built around an actor that just seems to get it completely, and then wanting to make a sequel if only for the sake of getting to work with her again.

At this point, I’ve seen four Radio Silence movies — both Ready or Nots, Abigail, and Scream — and I have the same major criticism of all of them. There’s this weird tonal whiplash, where it’s chugging along as light-hearted action horror before going into an extended slog where it’s just joylessly beating the shit out of its leads.

Marketing for the first Ready or Not sold this image of Grace as a bad-ass taking the fight back to the rich assholes who put her into this situation, but that was such a small part of that movie. The bulk of it felt like heaping abuse and even torture onto her, even beyond what feels like is “standard” for a horror movie protagonist. Ready or Not 2 has a little bit of a better balance, where there’s so much abuse heaped onto Grace early on that it almost goes back around to being darkly comic. And she does get more of an opportunity for payback in this one, including a couple of fight scenes that I thought were satisfying.

But as if to counter-balance that, it heaps a ton of violence onto Faith and later another woman character I won’t name in the interest of being mostly-spoiler-free. It feels like an attempt to stress how, among all of these comically reprehensible villains, one is clearly the worst, most dangerous, and least deserving of any trace of sympathy. But it goes so far that it felt kind of accusatory, as if we needed to be reminded how serious all of this is for the last act to have any stakes. How dare you think this is just nothing more than a horror comedy?

It didn’t ruin the movie for me. I liked this one about as much as the first Ready or Not, and by the end, they had sufficiently made their case for why they wanted to make a sequel. Not a story that necessarily demanded to be told, but more like an opportunity to work with people they like, and a storytelling challenge to force more life into a story and characters that had a strict do not resuscitate order on them.