Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing duo that calls itself Radio Silence, have kept busy since the release of 2019’s Ready or Not, making two Scream legacy sequels and the vampire-ballerina movie Abigail in a three-year span. Now, seven years later, they have returned to the hit they made their bones on with the awkwardly titled Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. That the title card does not bear the numeral suggests that its unpleasant intrusion in the marketing materials is the result of a cynical attitude toward its audience. Leave out the 2 and how would any dumb consumer know that this film bearing the same title, the same star, and the same plot as the first film is a sequel? If the film itself is not quite this contemptuous, its disinterest in offering anything new or even a moderately entertaining iteration speaks to a filmmaking team comfortable going through the motions. Ready or Not 2 is a movie animated by the spirit of “I guess we should make a sequel.”
The first Ready or Not was a fun but slight horror-comedy romp that layered facile social commentary — rich people worship Satan! — onto a novel premise in order to execute a few nifty suspense sequences. Gory but friendly, it exemplified the type of slick, anodyne filmmaking in which Radio Silence have come to specialize. For all the violence, all the bodies literally bursting in supernovas of CGI viscera, it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most horror averse balking at the content of their films. And for those same reasons, it’s equally difficult to imagine anything in their films sticking with anyone at all, instead of evaporating into the ether of lost memories the moment credits roll. Here I Come aims to deliver more of the same diversionary entertainment, only this time any exciting set pieces have been replaced by dull exposition and idiotic character drama.
Soon after the events of the first film, Grace (Samara Weaving) finds herself in the clutches of a cabal of Satan-worshipping psychopaths at a New England resort-casino-country club. The deaths of the family that tried to kill Grace last time out have triggered a power struggle amongst the other four families that sit on the council, and whichever head of household manages to kill Grace before dawn will assume power over the entire cult. For one more wrinkle, Grace’s estranged 18-year-old sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), is handcuffed to her when the hunt begins.
Though the premise of these films seems ripe for reproduction — simply drop Samara Weaving into a new location and unleash a new batch of wealthy Satanists upon her, rinse and repeat ad nauseam — Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett have failed to deliver on the goods. The shortcomings of this sequel go beyond mere diminishing returns to indicate a lack of effort in its conception. Everything here is a pale imitation of something that wasn’t great to begin with, from the uninspiring cast — Elijah Wood as the devil’s lawyer excepted — to the drab location that doesn’t have any of the character of the first movie’s old mansion. And instead of tension ratcheting suspense set pieces, the cultists’ attacks on Grace mostly take the form of limp, haphazardly designed fight scenes in nondescript rooms.
But worst of all is Here I Come’s commitment to the contrived drivel that makes up its family drama. The mystery of why Grace and Faith are estranged in the first place is stretched over nearly the entire movie, and the ultimate origin of their beef is so shrug-worthy that dedicating so much of the runtime to this at the expense of good fun comes across as terribly misguided. Ultimately, it’s just another inconsequential part of a decidedly nonessential sequel.
DIRECTOR: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett; CAST: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood, David Cronenberg; DISTRIBUTOR: Searchlight Pictures; IN THEATERS: March 20; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.
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