SXSW '26: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

In 2019, Ready or Not served as a harbinger of the now-annual release of eat-the-rich ensemble satires (The Menu, Saltburn, Blink Twice, and so on). It was a scrappy, $6 million-budget effort marking the first collaboration between directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet and co-screenwriter Guy Busick (also co-written by R. Christopher Murphy), who would later create horror franchise high-points Scream VI and Final Destination Bloodlines. Like those two films, Ready or Not successfully blended horror and comedy with a witty script, slapstick humor and in-your-face gore. And of course, there’s Samara Weaving, who delivered a performance effectively securing her legacy as a scream queen.

Ready or Not was a runaway hit and instant cult classic, and with that success comes the inevitable sequel. Weaving and both sets of co-directors and co-writers reunite for Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which had its world premiere at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival. But while this installment aims to be bigger and bolder, a suite of new characters can’t save the movie from a dumbed-down script.

The movie starts right where the previous film ended, with Weaving as Grace MacCaullay, the sole survivor of a satanic game of hide-and-seek, lighting a cigarette on the steps of her evil in-laws’ mansion before collapsing from blood loss. She wakes up handcuffed to a hospital bed and facing questioning from both a distrustful cop and her younger sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who’s shown up after 7 years of estrangement because Grace hadn’t removed her as an emergency contact. As Grace tries to explain what happened to a disbelieving Faith (and any uninitiated audience members), there arrives a new set of devil worshipers.

Without further ado, Grace and Faith are drugged and taken to what resembles a New England Mar-a-Lago, where they’re informed by the devil’s counsel (Elijah Wood, having a lot of fun as “The Lawyer”) that Grace’s survival has triggered another game of life-and-death. This time, she’ll have to face up against a council of devil-affiliated families as they all fight to secure the high council seat and control of the world. It’s a fair amount of story-building to pull off in the first 20 minutes or so, and to their credit Busick and Murphy don’t let that bog down the action. A lightning-fast montage effectively introduces us to the new key players at their clubs in London and skyscrapers in Shanghai, underscoring the immense wealth at play here, and there’s a fun bit with the devil’s bureaucracy as Elijah Wood’s lawyer delivers the rules of the game from a literal tome of bylaws.

This promising introduction, however, quickly becomes a retread of the previous film, with Grace scampering around a massive estate in a bloody wedding dress, trying to outsmart more heavily-armed elite. While Busick and Murphy attempt to add weight to the plot with the addition of Faith, her introduction feels contrived and the tension between her and Grace becomes tiresome as the movies goes on. The sisters are estranged because Grace left their foster home when she turned 18 and Faith was still 15—Faith never forgave her for this betrayal, and doesn’t stop reminding Grace of it throughout most of the movie, in a repetitive argument essentially boiling down to Faith saying “You abandoned me!” and Grace replying “I had to!” As Faith, Newton fails to bring anything other than Disney Channel sarcasm. She drags down the scenes she’s in with Grace, making it harder to find an emotional tenor to the sisters’ relationship. 

Beyond Faith, there are some gems in the new cast. David Cronenberg steals the first few scenes as Chester Danforth, the head of the council who stops wars—literally—with a phone call, and who asks his twin children Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy) to kill him before the new game starts so they can play in his stead. Both Gellar and Hatosy are excellent as two power-hungry siblings with a relationship far more layered than the main characters, and Hatosy in particular stands out with his performance of a man slowly giving into latent sociopathy as the game proceeds. Olivia Cheng does well as the more buttoned-up foil to flashier, more gauche council members like the Rajan family (Varun Saranga, Nadeem Umar-Khitab and Masa Lizdek), who mainly want to win the game to keep financing their high-flying lifestyle.

But the script doesn’t keep up with the charm of these new characters. In addition to failing at an emotional, family-driven subplot with Grace and Faith, Busick and Murphy overrely on goofy one-liners humor as each council member faces off against Grace. Where the first film deployed slapstick humor with a steady hand, the sequel overindexes on cheap gags. In one scene, Grace and one of her opponents, both temporarily blinded with pepper spray, attempt to fight each other but end up windmilling around the room, striking out against anything vaguely human shaped. It’s an over-long scene set to Total Eclipse of the Heart and only grows more monotonous as the fight drags on. It also makes for a disjointed tone, with juvenile humor wedged into genuinely violent and tense scenes.

Ultimately, Ready or Not 2 struggles to find its footing. With a literal wealth of new characters to play with, the film instead seems content to fall into a rhythm of fight, quip, kill, repeat, losing the charm of the first movie and failing to recognize Weaving as its greatest strength.

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