Studio:   Searchlight Pictures
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpen, Tyler Gillett
Writer:   Guy Busick, R. Christopher Murphy
Producer: Tripp Vinson, James Vanderbilt, William Sherak, Bradley J. Fischer
Stars:    Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Nestor Carbonell, Kevin Durand, David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood

Review Score:

Summary:

After surviving her previous ordeal, a newlywed bride gets dragged into another deadly game of Hide and Seek against psychotic families trying to fulfill a Satanic pact.

Synopsis:

In the aftermath of her ordeal at the Le Domas family mansion, where every one of her new in-laws died after failing to kill her as their sacrifice in a Satanic game of Hide and Seek, Grace MacCaullay recovers at St. John’s Hospital in Connecticut. With her handcuffed to her hospital bed, Detective Roger Bassett briefly questions Grace on suspicion of arson and murder.

Because she was still listed as Grace’s emergency contact, Grace’s younger sister Faith comes to the hospital despite years of estrangement between the two sisters. Faith claims she has been living a happy life in spite of Grace abandoning her when they were 15 and 18. Grace recounts the unbelievable story of what happened at the Le Domas mansion.

A Lawyer representing Mr. Le Bail, an incarnation of Satan, informs ailing billionaire Chester Danforth that the Le Domas family died and the bride escaped. Chester tells his servant Pernilla to gather his daughter Ursula and Ursula’s twin brother Titus. Chester also texts “the ball is in play” to members of the Wan, El Caido, Rajan, and Wilkinson families.

Ursula and Titus greet their father. Showing them the ring representing his position as the highest seat in their Satanic council, Chester insists the sigil must stay in their family. To give the Danforths a youthful advantage in the upcoming contest to determine their organization’s new leader, Chester has his two children smother him to death with a pillow.

With Grace in custody, Detective Bassett begins escorting her and her sister out of the hospital when he is suddenly killed by a knife thrown by Bill Wilkinson of the Wilkinson family. Before he can kill Grace, however, Bill suddenly explodes in a burst of blood, shocking Faith. From an evidence bag, Grace dons her bloody wedding dress to prepare for the fight ahead.

The Lawyer comes to the hospital. He remarks that Bill Wilkinson broke one of Mr. Le Bail’s rules by trying to kill the bride before their game could officially begin, thereby condemning Bill’s entire bloodline to premature deaths. The Lawyer and Pernilla then capture the two sisters by knocking them out with a gas grenade.

Ursula and Titus host the first in-person meeting of their council since 1963 at the Danforth family’s sprawling estate, which includes a resort and casino as part of the massive property. Ignacio El Caido arrives with his young son Felipe. Chen Xing Wan brings her distracted son Cheng Fu. Brothers Madhu and Viraj Rajan arrive with Madhu’s socialite wife Martina. Ursula and Titus’s arrogant cousin Kip also joins.

Bound and gagged, Grace and Faith are presented to the assembled families. The Lawyer explains that because she survived her experience with the Le Domas family, Grace triggered a bylaw that vacated their Satanic order’s highest seat. She now has an opportunity to play another game of Hide and Seek where if she survives by dawn, or if someone kills her, that person will gain the sigil of power that makes them the organization’s leader. The Lawyer forces Grace to participate by threatening to kill her sister if she doesn’t.

Arriving late, Ignacio’s distressed daughter Francesca enters. Accusing Grace of ruining her life, Francesca angrily confronts Grace with the revelation that she was engaged to Alex Le Domas before Alex left her for Grace.

Grace and Faith are given injections to knock them unconscious, are handcuffed together, and dumped at the ninth hole of the estate’s golf course for their starting point. The Lawyer explains the game’s rules to everyone else, stipulating that they must hunt with weapons from the era in which their ancestors made their bargains with Mr. Le Bail and they cannot kill each other. Ursula, Titus, Chen Xing, Ignacio, and Viraj begin the contest while the other family members wait in an observation room to take over as their family’s next-in-succession representative in the event someone dies.

Through a drone she flies toward the sisters, Chen Xing begins telling Grace and Faith that she knows of a loophole they can exploit together, but the Danforth twins shoot down the drone. After fleeing from the scene, and in subsequent lulls thereafter, the sisters argue about their problematic past as they try to reconcile their differences.

Ursula and Titus catch up to Grace and Faith, but the sisters get away. Ignacio fires at them with a high-powered rifle, but the duo escapes in a smokescreen by burning a bag of leaves.

Inside the casino, Grace and Faith find a workroom with a saw they use to separate their handcuffs. Wearing a mask and armed with a machete, Viraj stalks them both. The sisters eventually manage to kill Viraj by gruesomely drowning him in an industrial washing machine.

With Viraj dead, the Lawyer informs his brother that he must take Viraj’s place. Afraid of what might happen to him, Madhu abdicates his position as the head of the Rajan family by appointing his wife Martina as the legal head of their household. Martina curses Madhu for endangering her.

Grace uses Viraj’s cellphone to dial 911. Ursula intercepts the call and issues instructions for the sisters to go to the property’s main gate.

On their way through the casino, Grace and Faith run into Chen Xing, who threatens them with her sword. Chen Xing explains that her attorney found a loophole in the bylaws that state if Grace marries Chen Xing’s son Cheng Fu, the Wan family obtains the council high seat and Grace survives. Despite her sister insisting they can end their ordeal easily, Grace refuses the offer because marriage would force her to participate in Satanic activities as a member of their order.

Ignacio interrupts the negotiation. Grace grabs Chen Xing’s hand, enabling her to guide the other woman’s sword into Ignacio’s throat, killing him. As the penalty for murdering another family’s member, Chen Xing spontaneously explodes. Her son also explodes all over everyone in the observation room.

Faith asks why Grace didn’t save them by agreeing to marry Cheng Fu. Grace explains that she doesn’t want to sell her soul like the others did. This leads to another argument about growing up as foster kids. Grace apologizes for leaving home when Faith was only 15. Faith admits she lied about having a happy life to make her sister jealous. Grace and Faith laugh together.

Aware that Ursula was impersonating a dispatcher, Grace places another 911 call to lure the Danforth siblings into a trap. With the twins subdued, Grace and Faith demand that the front gate be unlocked. Wanting to escape the scene herself, Martina Rajan unexpectedly races toward the gate and rams it open with her speeding vehicle. After rescuing Grace from Ursula in the subsequent commotion, Faith and Grace drive away in a golfcart.

Madhu offers to take his wife’s place. The Lawyer explains that even though she abandoned the hunt, Martina is still the head of the Rajan family and controls all of Madhu’s assets.

While hiding in a banquet hall, Grace and Faith have another fight about their estrangement. This leads to Faith storming off alone.

Anxious to replace her father so she can exact vengeance for her engagement being called off, Francesca El Caido fires at Grace with a rocket launcher, but shoots it in the wrong direction. After spraying each other with pepper spray, Grace and Francesca engage in a vicious struggle despite both women being blinded.

Faith decides to go back for her sister, but Titus halts her for a violent fight of their own. Ursula ultimately stops her brother from killing Faith so she can be used as bait instead.

Having left the fight with Francesca, Grace arms herself with a shotgun from a security office. Francesca confronts her again. Grace immediately shoots Francesca dead without hesitation.

Searching for her sister, Grace barges into the observation room. As next in his family’s line of succession, Felipe El Caido unsuccessfully tries shooting Grace with dual handguns.

Titus confronts Grace while holding a gun to Faith’s head. Remembering what Chen Xing revealed, Grace proposes marrying Titus so he gets the high seat and she gets to leave. Upon agreeing to surrender terms, Titus accepts the proposal, allowing Grace and Faith to reunite.

Titus sends servants to Grace’s chambers to prepare her for the marriage ceremony. Ursula privately warns Grace that her brother is evil and asks for Grace’s help controlling him. Overhearing the exchange, Titus interrupts to snap his sister’s neck for betraying him.

The remaining family members gather with robed cultists in an underground temple where the Lawyer presides over Titus and Grace’s Satanic wedding ceremony. Grace and Titus exchange vows to become officially wed. Titus forcibly kisses Grace to seal their union.

Titus hoists the ring of power as everyone assembled hails him in Satan’s name. Grace suddenly stabs Titus repeatedly and reminds him that his murder of Ursula proved members of the same family could kill each other. Grace takes the ring before kicking Titus into a spike pit he dies at the bottom of.

Presenting herself as the order’s new leader, Grace commands everyone to kneel before her. The Lawyer confirms Grace now has the right to do whatever she wants. For her first act of power, Grace removes herself from the council, vacating the high seat.

The Lawyer informs the assembly that, per Mr. Le Bail’s specifications, someone must wear the ring by dawn, which is only three minutes away. Grace throws the sigil ring into the charnel pit with Titus’s body. Cultists, Kip Danforth, Felipe El Caido, and Danforth servant Pernilla immediately jump into the pit for a bloody scramble where everyone murders and mutilates each other to try taking possession of the ring.

When 6am strikes, everyone still alive in the pit collectively combusts into a geyser of blood. Madhu Rajan reveals he never jumped into the pit, but he suddenly explodes too.

Grace and Faith briefly see a fiery image of Mr. Le Bail on a black throne. The Lawyer allows them to leave. On their way outside, Grace rescues a goat. After telling each other, “I love you,” the sisters walk away holding hands.

Review:

Surprisingly, “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” seems to take quite a few cues from “Halloween II” (review here) for how to set itself up as a sequel. That might not be a smart strategy for keeping a young franchise alive in the long term. Even though plenty of “Halloween” fans hold its 1981 follow-up in high regard, the introduction of new lore that fundamentally changed Laurie Strode’s dynamic with Michael Myers became a burden that additional sequels had trouble working with, resulting in retcons, reboots, and multiple continuities whose drops in quality can be partly attributed to having to incorporate flawed fiction. Creatively speaking, “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” looks like it could be pointing itself toward a similarly constricting corner.

Like “Halloween II,” “Ready or Not 2” starts right where the previous movie ended, with Samara Weaving’s blood-caked bride, Grace, catatonically exiting a fiery mansion where everyone from the wealthy family she recently married into just suffered gruesome deaths. Grace soon passes out, allowing a match cut to move her to a hospital, the same place where Laurie Strode went after escaping her initial encounter with The Shape, and drop her into a hospital gown with a pattern not unlike the same one Strode wore.

Holding her on suspicion of arson and murder, a detective begins questioning Grace until he’s interrupted by an unexpected visitor. Grace was thought to be an orphaned only child, but it turns out she has a younger sister, Faith, whom she hasn’t spoken to in years. Since John Carpenter and Debra Hill threw a Hail Mary to squeeze a sequel out of a premise designed for only one film, “Ready or Not 2” once again emulates its idol by throwing the same desperation pass with a long-lost sibling surprise.

Almost immediately, the detective leaves the two estranged sisters alone to get reacquainted. Get used to characters suddenly traveling from one location to another as a scripting convenience absent of narrative motivation. It happens a whole lot more once another deadly Hide and Seek game gets underway at another sprawling estate where, even with security cameras covering every inch of the property, it’s apparently impossible to track where anyone is at any given time.

Return viewers coming back with a cloudy memory of how the first game went down, and new viewers coming in blind, get blanks filled in by a background dump courtesy of Grace’s detailed recap for Faith. In the meantime, news of the Le Domas family’s demise spreads among five other families of high-society miscreants. A lawyer overseeing these affairs, played by Elijah Wood with a hefty spoonful of chunky relish for his oddball role, later explains that by surviving her Hide and Seek game, Grace “triggered a very seldom-used clause in our organization’s bylaws.” With no deeper explanation than that, the high seat in their secret Satanic order is now vacant. For someone to take power, Grace has to be hunted a second time, with the caveat being Grace can become their supreme leader if she and her sister stay alive until dawn.

This plot tees up a perfect opportunity for slyly satirizing pitiable personalities and social class disparities. Instead of depicting these depraved participants with timely distinctions like callous pharma bro, insensitive tech mogul, or fascism-minded power player, however, “Ready or Not 2” settles for making the new families a blob of basic brats coming from interchangeable lives of privilege. The women dress in Real Housewives fashion. More than one man has a shiny chain hanging on his exposed chest. One of the younger boys spends the whole time glued to his handheld gaming device. It should be easy to cheer on the deaths of fictional billionaires who built evil empires by exploiting poorer people, except these bad guys are a common cult of simple stereotypes, not clever parodies of alter egos that actors can really sink their teeth into.

Only one representative from each family can participate at a time. Because they have so many members, half of them must wait in an observation room while the person in front of them hunts. If someone dies during the game, the next person in a particular bloodline takes that place. This removes a significant bit of suspense by giving viewers a guarantee that the starting lineup will definitely die so benchwarmers get time on the field too. We just don’t know when or how these hunters will meet their grisly ends, except that it will probably be at Grace and Faith’s hands.

And going by what fans of the first “Ready or Not” film crowed about, “Ready or Not 2” eagerly dishes out more of the chaotic carnage, exploding bodies, and Old Faithful blood geysers that have come to define the budding brand after two entries. That should be music to overjoyed ears that enjoy the gleeful gore of spontaneous combustion, swords through the neck, rocket launcher blasts, and goons melting in industrial washing machines. There’s also a masked killer who does the Undertaker’s signature sit-up after being mistaken for a dead man, in case anyone needs one more nod to “Halloween.”

One person’s treasure can be another person’s trash, meaning those who didn’t synch to “Ready or Not’s” routine the first time around won’t find much for them in a sequel that feels rushed in spite of seven years passing since the original. Even with all the gunplay, grime, and goopy action, “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” hits a lot of lulls used solely for bickering between Grace and Faith as the feuding sisters hit predictable points along their path to an inevitable reconciliation.

With so many of the usual tricks and tropes on display, including the umpteenth use of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as a thematic needle drop, maybe more eyes will notice how short the legs are on the limited concept of a resilient heroine unleashing whoop-ass on empty upper-class sociopaths. That is the “Ready or Not” brand though, which is why a third stab has its job cut out for it in trying to make a more meaningful mark with what there is to work with.

Review Score: 55