‘READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME’ Says “I Don’t”

Grace (Samara Weaving) has not been having a banner week of post-wedding bliss. After barely surviving her Satan-worshipping in-laws’ attempt to slaughter her during a “family initiation” involving a deadly game of hide and seek, she now finds herself targeted by a broader apparatus of satanic power brokers, each eager to take their own swipe at her in hopes of elevating their status on the high council. The film itself is an escalation in scope, if not in imagination. Though Ready or Not 2: Here I Come wastes no time throwing us into one bloody battle after another, it fails to conjure the same intrigue as its predecessor, instead delivering a fairly generic and ultimately forgettable sequel that just kind of batters its way to its inevitable conclusion. The ensemble cast, led by Weaving – who remains fully committed to the trembling but ferocious final girl – does what it can, but this is the kind of sequel that doesn’t so much build on the original as it simply prolongs it like a marriage already headed for divorce.

The second chapter picks up moments after the first left off, with blood-soaked bride Grace sitting in front of the burning Le Domas mansion. Smoking a cigarette. She’s arrested under suspicion of foul play and hospitalized, where her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) shows up, still listed as her emergency contact. The two haven’t seen each other in seven years, ever since Grace left for New York at eighteen to pursue her own life, effectively abandoning Faith. Their reunion is appropriately icy, shaped by lingering resentment and years of being excommunicado. It doesn’t take much convincing, however, for Faith to believe Grace’s far-fetched story about her homicidal in-laws, seeing that a member of the billionaire murder-cult interrupts their reunion with his own attempt on their lives, which rather helpfully proves her case.

With the entire Le Domas family wiped out, an ancient bylaw has been triggered, and the high seat on the council of the world’s most powerful men and women must be reassigned. All six remaining families on the board are pitted against one another in a race to claim the top position, which comes with a ring that grants near-total control over everything from the military to the media to local law enforcement. The proceedings are overseen, somewhat cheekily, by Elijah Wood, who remains no stranger to a ring of power.

Among those vying for control are Titus and Ursula Danforth, played by Shawn Hatosy (The Pitt) and Sarah Michelle Gellar, the offspring of the previous council leader, portrayed by horror maestro David Cronenberg in a rare on-screen appearance. The rules are simple: whichever family kills Grace first takes the seat. Having survived the previous attempt on her life, Grace is also in on the games in a way. Should she elude her would-be assassins until dawn, she herself becomes the leader of their satanic cult. But her survival is compromised by being handcuffed (literally and metaphorically) to her kid sister Faith, framing the story around the two sisters attempting to rebuild a relationship fractured by years of abandonment and mistrust. The film gestures toward an emotional core about choosing family and earning forgiveness, with Grace now forced to prove she won’t run again, but the whole sister-reunion plot remains mostly just milquetoast and generic.

Though the cast remains game and Weaving continues to cement her status as a modern scream queen, this horror-comedy follow-up falls mostly short on both the “comedy” and “horror” fronts. The first film thrived on a sense of discovery. What began as a bizarre bit of post-wedding pageantry gradually curdled into something far more sinister, each new reveal escalating the danger and the absurdity in equal measure. Here, that sense of progression is almost entirely absent. Everything is laid out upfront: the rules, the players, the stakes, and the film never meaningfully builds from there. There’s no creeping realization, no tightening vice, just a series of events that feel predetermined and predictable rather than escalating. As a result, the film plays flatter, more mechanical, and far less surprising.

The kills, while occasionally inventive, aren’t particularly memorable. A sequence involving an industrial washing machine feels like the de facto barometer for how this movie will play things – it’s a moment that should tip into full splatter mayhem but instead pulls back just as things threaten to get interesting and deliciously squirmy. The comedy fares similarly, working in fits and starts, but ultimately just never delivers any knock-outs. The bureaucratic absurdity of the satanic council, with its endless rules, loopholes, and procedural nonsense, provides some of the film’s better moments, especially through Elijah Wood’s dry, mildly sneering delivery. There’s the outline of a sharper joke here about power structures being built on arbitrary, nonsensical systems, but the film never quite commits to that idea, leaving it as background noise rather than a driving force.

To its credit, the film, directed by returning director duo Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, is competently shot. There’s nothing outright disastrous here on a technical level so much as it just all feels pretty identity-less, and visually stale. But the main issue lies more with the script, credited to Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, with Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett also contributing to the screenplay, which lacks the same bite and precision that made the original stand out. It just feels indistinguishable from a growing wave of horror comedies that share the same aesthetic, the same flattened visual style, and the same reluctance to push things far enough, despite an R-rating. It’s the kind of movie where even the casting starts to blur together, with Katherine Newton once again popping up in yet another entry in this increasingly uniform lite-horror-comedy subgenre. There are moments of fun, but they’re fleeting and won’t remain sticky. Beyond expanding the lore and setting up a new path forward for Grace and Faith, the film ultimately feels like a commitment that’s lost its spark.

CONCLUSION: Competent but unremarkable, ‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’ is a horror-comedy sequel that’s mostly just a forgettable extension of the original’s eat-the-satanic-rich premise, expanding the mythology without recapturing the spark that made it sing. Samara Weaving remains the MVP, and the cast is easily the film’s strongest asset, but it’s not enough to elevate a sequel that never quite justifies going down the aisle once more.