READY OR NOT
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Andie MacDowell
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME
**/****
starring Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett
by Walter Chaw There’s an old chestnut that you can always tell who we’re going to war with next by the villains in our mass entertainments. I hope that’s true, because over the past few years, the bad guys in movies have been explicitly and almost exclusively the rich. No warfare except class warfare, amiright? That’s one of the reasons I loved Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s 2019 thriller Ready or Not, a key example of the dam breaking in the proletariat’s tolerance for the excesses of the bourgeoisie. It’s also a crackerjack horror contraption that establishes fresh lore without making lore the purpose of its existence, and it minted a genre superstar in Samara Weaving following years of strong showings in cult triumphs (like The Babysitter, Mayhem, and Guns Akimbo). Should the Evil Dead series get another reboot, Weaving is the natural heir to Bruce Campbell’s throne, possessed of the same A-list good looks, the same elastic expressiveness, the same gift for slapstick and self-effacing sense of humour.* Ready or Not really feels like a modern screwball classic–a genre metastasis of the marriage comedies of the 1940s, starring the new Carole Lombard and a few gallons of blood.
Grace (Weaving) is marrying Alex (Mark O’Brien), scion of the Le Domas, who, well, shoot, you know who the Le Domases are. Because Grace is a product of poverty and the foster-care system, Alex’s family, gathered at the sprawling Le Domas estate to attend the nuptials, is properly on guard for hints of potential gold-digging. At midnight on her wedding night, Grace is told that to be fully indoctrinated into the Le Domas clan, she must randomly select a game the whole family will play–sort of a “getting to know you” exercise inaugurated several generations ago in a deal a Le Domas ancestor made with a mysterious stranger, Le Bail, during the long course of an ocean journey. The staggering success of the Le Domas empire, in fact, may or may not trace back to this deal, and its continued thriving is contingent on the proper execution of the game-playing ritual with new members of the family. Instructed to pick a card from the Le Bail puzzle-box (which suggests the handiwork of the same toymaker responsible for the Lament Configuration in Hellraiser), Grace, woe for her, pulls hide-and-seek. The rules? She needs to stay undiscovered until dawn. If the family can’t find and sacrifice her to Le Bail before then, they become the sacrifice.
So, we’re talking a cross between “The Most Dangerous Game” and The Westing Game in which the hero is a resourceful member of the 99% who, at one point, screams “Fucking rich people!” at wealthy passersby when they fail to demonstrate even a modicum of the decency and empathy expected of social animals. Indeed, the Le Domases are a collection of privileged assholes: alcoholics, narcissists, grasping opportunists, and every other species of wasted flesh destroyed by billionaire brain disease. Smaugs, all–but not exactly skilled chess players, and thus given to accidentally slaying their own servants. Did all the murdered employees being comely young women give me pause? It did. There’s a certain misogyny embedded in Ready or Not that I was willing to forgive, largely because the exploitation of young women is symptomatic of the super-wealthy. A feature, not a bug, in other words. I confess that upon repeat viewings, especially after revisiting the film in the wake of its sequel, I’m having more trouble justifying said misogyny. I wonder how much my loving Ready or Not lays bare my own unaddressed biases. Why, for instance, am I ever okay with misogyny? Why am I eager to rationalize it? Anyway, it’s on brand that every poor person the rich bastards terminate happens to be a beautiful young woman. Dario Argento, eat your heart out. What I appreciate is the elegance of a plot that is essentially about how a fabulously wealthy family has made it a tradition–and a family affair, with kids encouraged to participate–to murder an innocent person for the sake of preserving their wealth and status. Yes, Ready or Not could be a documentary.
The pleasures of Ready or Not include Weaving’s performance, the wittiness of Guy Busick and Christopher Murphy’s script, and the clockwork pacing. Grace is as convincingly nonplussed by the turn her honeymoon has taken as she is resilient in the face of the betrayal. One scene, featuring a dashcam, a murderous butler (John Ralston), and an opera cranked up way too loud on a car radio, is a showcase in how to derive tension and comedy from the audience having more knowledge of the peril than the players. Here, the butler celebrates his capture of Grace without realizing that she’s regaining consciousness in the backseat. The Le Domas, observing from afar, are losing their minds. I thought of Grace Kelly breaking into the killer’s apartment in Rear Window while Jimmy Stewart, incapacitated by a broken leg in the building across the street, can only watch in horror as everything goes awry for her. I also appreciate how, in a moment of crisis, the family patriarch (Henry Czerny) tries to stave off his fate by declaring that his status should supersede all other considerations. It’s the equivalent of asking to talk to Unavoidable Consequences’ manager; I honestly can’t think of a better illustration of money’s infernal, corrosive power over an individual’s perception of reality.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come has a lot less to say. In truth, it has nothing original to say, choosing instead to play everything out again with more explosions and a tortured bloating of lore that amounts to, basically, “the Devil rules the world through rich people,” which, if anything, lets the 1% off the hook. In the fashion of sequels, Ready or Not 2 is more a magnification than an enrichment: the same volume of liquid spread a mile wide, creating a much shallower pool. I was delighted, initially, when David Cronenberg showed up as the head of another powerful family, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy in tow as Ursula and Titus, his psychotic progeny, who are tasked with plucking Grace from the hospital. I was excited, too, by early indications that Ready or Not 2 would follow in the footsteps of Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II and take place in a hospital. Alas, Grace is kidnapped–along with her spunky sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton)–and spirited away to another mansion, where another set of families gathers for the honour of sacrificing Grace to La Bail, this time for the right to rule the world from their living room with a satellite telephone.
The fun I had last time is gone, replaced with a touch of moral trepidation. Boredom, even. I don’t know if Ready or Not 2 is that much worse or merely familiar, as though the inspiration got used up in the first two hours, leaving the entirety of this sequel an unnecessary and overlong rehash. The kills no longer serve a useful critical purpose. Take, for example, how Titus, in his urge for power, murders Ursula in a protracted, ugly sequence. Given Gellar’s inescapable pop-cultural footprint as the indomitable Buffy the Vampire Slayer, finishing her off in this way feels almost…pointed, even personal. I get Ready or Not 2‘s intent to hold up Titus and Ursula’s disintegrating sibling relationship as a funhouse mirror to Grace and Faith’s strengthening bond, but there’s too much baggage with Gellar’s identity to dispatch her so…intimately? Is that the word? Cruelly? I know these films are bloodthirsty, but it becomes a bridge too far once the guardrails of meaningful social satire are transgressed.
There’s a clever sequence involving pepper spray and shifting perspectives that serves as a reminder of the filmmakers’ facility with timing and visual humour, but it’s fleeting and so superior to what the movie generally has to offer that it actually makes everything else seem all the more listless and uninspired. If they’re capable of this absurd gag in which two suddenly vision-impaired people try to kill each other, why are the other kills so flat and conventional? See also: a grand finale that lacks the bombastic surprise and delight of the first film’s conclusion, with Elijah Wood playing a Pez Dispenser if the Pez were exposition, doling out new arcane rules on the spot like an official for Calvinball. And all the while, they have a fucking hellpit and don’t do anything with it. Maybe most disappointingly, Ready or Not 2 misses the opportunity to promote its surviving servant character (Kara Wooten) into the chambers of power. In other words, if the world were run by someone actually born of privation, humiliation, and struggle, what would that look like? (Are they saving that for the third one?) All this to say that while I didn’t necessarily hate Ready or Not 2, I was disheartened by how typical it is. It behaves like a knock-off of Ready or Not that figured out the notes but not the music. Stars like Weaving will disguise that for a while. So will swelling budgets and multiplying casts of beloved guest stars. But I worry this house was misleading about the strength of its foundation.
*She did appear as a hiker on TV’s “Ash vs Evil Dead”, but if anyone deserves a retcon and Palpatine-ing, it’s her.
