Del and Mladen review ‘Ready or Not 2 Here I Come’

Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

“Ready or Not 2 Here I Come” Starring Samara Weaving as Grace MacCaullay, Kathryn Newton as Faith MacCaullay, Elijah Wood as the lawyer, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Ursula Danforth, Shawn Hatosy as Titus Danforth, David Cronenberg as Chester Danforth and others. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. 1 hour, 48 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Plot summary: Sitting on the front steps of the Le Domas family mansion after the deadly events of “Ready or Not,” Grace MacCaullay finds herself swept up in a new, deadlier hide-and-seek style contest as members of four families vie for control of the High Council, a body that serves Mr. La Bail, aka Lucifer.

Spoilers: Does the Devil wear Prada?

Del’s take

Grace MacCaullay has just defeated the entire Lucifer-worshipping Le Domas clan in a night of bloody mayhem at their now flaming mansion. The authorities rightfully suspect Grace as having committed many felonies, but she’s injured. She’s taken to a hospital. She’s grilled by a detective who has already decided her guilt. Her estranged sister, Faith, is summoned, as Grace never removed Faith as her emergency contact. And then. …

She and Faith are brought before the shadowy High Council, where they learn (a) the Le Domas clan wasn’t the only collective of rich bitches who sold their souls to the devil for worldly wealth, (b) Grace’s destruction of the Le Domas family has created a vacancy at the head of a cabal of devil-worshippers called the High Council, and (c) four new families will compete for that vacant position – and the immense power it conveys – by sacrificing Grace and her sister to Mr. La Bail, aka the devil, before the sun rises the next day.

Sound familiar?

Yes, “Ready or Not 2” is about power. In an opening scene, Chester Danforth – before he is smothered by his children – watches a war play out on the TV news, then picks up his telephone, orders a cease-fire, and watches the breathless announcement of a cessation in hostilities on the very same news broadcast. And yes, “Ready or Not 2” is an eat-the-rich indulgence in wish fulfillment, especially in 2026, as the 1 percenters pad their velvet-upholstered cushion of wealth and control at the expense of poor suckers like you and me.

But what “Ready or Not 2” really wants to be is a John Wickian-style semi-comedy about the power of family, which is the weakest of its three subtextual pillars. The whole family-comes-first theme is largely irrelevant to the matters at hand – the bloody extermination of wealthy parasites and their useless scions as creatively and graphically as possible. In fact, the constant intrusion of guilt becomes annoying – how often can Faith remind Grace that she abandoned her little sister, that she “wasn’t there”? Americans are besotten with this notion of familial abandonment. It’s become trite, an easy fallback when an icing of emotional resonance is needed for tension or motivation.

The comedic aspects of “Ready or Not 2” are somewhat clever and operate on multiple levels, but the overall tone is one of satire, not slapstick, though some scenes definitely qualify as physical humor – the rocket launcher, for example. Dialogue has its moments, too, but the quality of the writing isn’t as sharp or as hilariously acerbic as something like “Doctor Strangelove.” Overall, the humor tends to trivialize, not satirize, making it impossible to view “Ready or Not 2” as anything but a trifle.

As is the case with many horror movies these days, even the ones alleged to be funny, “Ready or Not 2” is drenched in blood, and some of the violence crosses the line between horror and torture porn. For example, an extended battle between Titus and Faith became a teeth-loosening, rib-cracking orgy of mayhem that goes on far too long. Were Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett were taking far too much pleasure seeing their female character get her ass kicked?

The first act is slow, but acts two and three pick up the pace, redeeming “Ready or Not 2” as an entertaining movie. But like a SnapChat message sent late at night, anything of significance fades by morning, relegating “Ready or Not 2” to the sales bin of disposable entertainment, stat. Again, it’s a trifle. Nothing more.

I’m giving it a B. See it in a movie theater.

Mladen’s take

Samara Weaving and Kathyrn Newton are very good actresses. Their faces express as much about what they’re thinking as the words they’re saying in “Ready or Not 2 Here I Come.”

Also praiseworthy is the pit massacre near the end of the movie. Clearly, it was modeled on the way the Trump administration operates.

Between the sisters’ back-and-forth squabbling and rehashes of family history and the pit, there are a few chuckle-inducing skits. I enjoyed watching Elijah Wood play the anti-Frodo, though his rendition of a Mephistopheles wedding prayer and ritual could have been more joyful.

But, none of these bits of the positive make “Ready or Not 2” good.

Again and again and again, the protagonists and the antagonists make damnably poor choices, because, I don’t know, the scriptwriters were too unimaginative to come up with more realistic ways folks end up making dumbass decisions. Either the estranged but re-uniting sisters prolonged their misery by, say, not shooting or beheading the brother-and-sister team trying to kill them to get the chairman’s seat on the bedeviled High Council or the antagonists, whose souls have been sold to Satan, turn out to be remarkably poor shots or too conniving for their own good or just too maniacal. Come on, you’re allied with Beelzebub. Wouldn’t that automatically imbue you with capacity to have at least one of the, oh, dozen, 50-caliber bullets you fired from a high-end sniper rifle find its mark?

One other bit in the movie irritated me. It’s the poor choice of vocabulary. Whenever one of the devil worshippers violated a devil worship bylaw, they would metamorphose into a fountain of gelatinous goo that had a large splash radius. The younger MacCaullay called those splatter events “combustion.” No, no, no. The evildoers didn’t catch fire. They didn’t burn. They exploded, goddamnit.

More deeply disappointing, though, was that my building hope was dashed. As “Ready or Not 2” progressed, I started to hope that the elder MacCaullay would figure out a way to knock off Lucifer or at least subvert Hell by turning it into an alternative Heaven. No such luck. The best she was able to do was initiate the pit mayhem, which, though much appreciated, felt like she had failed to finish what she was dragged into.

I have not watched the first “Ready or Not” and I had no expectations for “Ready or Not 2.” In fact, when Dusty asked us if we’d like to see the movie, I confused it with another title that appeared in theaters in late 2025, “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t.” I knew nothing about “Ready or Not 2” before I saw it. So, my review is sincere, my counsel untainted. You can wait for this one-notch-above-a-C+ movie to hit the streaming circuit.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.