Thursday, 9 April 2026
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026, dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett)
The first Ready or Not movie is one of my most rewatched movies—it’s fun and witty and tense, tying together action horror with more significant commentary, delivering these iconic visuals steeped in cultural relevance and aesthetic appeal. I love literally everything about it and was so surprised yet excited to see a sequel coming out. For so many years, I’d praised this stand-alone classic, and lamented that the movie leaves little room for a sequel. And how right I was.
As much as I’m tempted to, I can’t divorce this movie (or its sequel) from the cultural spot it takes up in my mind. Following the late-2010s trend of overtly socially conscious horror, the first film in this series boasts explicit ideas about marriage and class and wealth (some if not all of these tragically difficult to depict with any sort of finesse or novelty), but does so very firmly rooted in the comedy horror space and taking so much of its foundation from the supernatural-slasher subgenre. There’s this iconic visual on many of the posters and the trailer of Samara Weaving in this lacy white wedding dress with an antique shotgun and bandolera and in this gold-tinted lighting and it truly so well captures this film’s vibe… and attempts to capture this film’s vibe as well.
Yes, the iconic bloodied wedding dress returns in 2026’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a choice that symbolizes my plethora of issues with it. What once was a stunning costume choice reflecting a lovely production design choice becomes a sequel’s best effort at continuing a legacy it cannot carry on. That’s the thing about this movie: it is doing nothing new.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come picks up exactly where the first film left off: Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) on the steps of the burning mansion of her dead (ex?) husband’s family. She’s rushed to the hospital where her estranged sister and emergency contact Faith (Kathryn Newton) visits her. Meanwhile, the collective of families who made deals with the devil for wealth plans to hunt Grace down due to some clauses in their rules. Leading—by the film’s focus and not in so successfully in practicality—the collective are twins Ursula and Titus Danforth (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy). Along with five (and quickly four) other families, they chase Grace and her sister across a golf course, mostly, in aims of killing her for their own gain.
Highlighted by an early flashback to the first film, the actual visual style of the sequel is totally different—the yellow tint removed, the costumes vaguely wealthy but mainly nondescript, the setting an eternal blue sky on a bright green golf course (and the occasional casino). But then there are these half-hearted attempts to echo the first film: the antique weaponry, for one. This is one of many efforts to reference that film, remind you every time Kathryn Newton’s katana exchanges hands that this film has character, if only you have the eyes to see it.
Another more egregious instance of this: the introduction of a half-dozen rules to orient the film. I get it, the first movie was about a board game empire and the title refers to the hide-and-seek game’s chant, so the second has to have the same concept. Only the best explanation we get is tradition (speaking in a Doylist sense here; there is an in-universe explanation) and the execution leaves you counting. This film relies on this list of rules to kind of give the action some structure and emulate having character, but instead they guide the narrative with so few teeth that conflicts have little gravity and the ending is underwhelmingly predictable. There are further attempts at other writerly things that amount to very little: lack of specificity in the characters, foils and parallels leaving much to be desired, and a fumbling idea of a thesis. In short, it’s incoherent and generic (though certainly not the most incoherent or generic movie written in part by Guy Busick release this spring).
One of my main points of praise for the first film was the commitment to fleshing out the wealthy characters, though this film makes hardly any effort to do the same. There’s some Busick-typical sibling parallels that don’t hit here at all. The exceptions were Samara Weaving’s charming reprisal of main character Grace and the always lovely Kathryn Newton bringing just an excellent energy amidst all this blandness. There are some stand outs in the cast of the families, like Maia Jae as Grace’s dead husband’s jilted fiancée, but she’s given little time to shine amidst a huge cast. It was entirely too many people we knew little about and the world felt all the emptier for it. This doesn’t even take into account that for so many of these characters, the majority of their scenes were watching the action on a security feed and commentating. Riveting character work that allows.
This movie feels like someone who has only ever watched sort of bland action movies got a summary of Ready or Not, placing nonsensical references to the first film over the just such generic visuals. It’s trying to do way too much at the same time it’s not doing anything at all.