The day after surviving a deadly game of hide and seek, a young woman is forced to play one more time—this time, joined by her sister—in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which bows in Prague cinemas this weekend a few weeks after debuting Stateside. This gormless sequel essentially the same movie as the first Ready or Not, which was a surprise hit both critically and commercially, but there are two key differences here: the audience is in on all the twists from the get-go, and the antagonists are far less of a threat.
That results in a feature that is considerably less fun than last time around, despite slick direction from Radio Silence (filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett), extensive bloodletting effects that go toe-to-toe with the recent They Will Kill You, and another commanding performance from Samara Weaving, who injects all the life missing from the screenplay co-written by the directors and Guy Busick & R. Christopher Murphy.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come stars Weaving as Grace MacCaullay, who survived ritual sacrifice by the Satanist family she married into in the previous film, and watched all her in-laws explode into volcanoes of gore in the process. She awakes the following day in a hospital staring at estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who she hasn’t seen in years, and a curious detective (Grant Nickalls), who wants to ask this lone survivor a thing or two about all the body parts he had to wade through at the crime scene.
But the detective has an axe in his head before he can get to that first question, as coke-mad Bill Wilkinson (Kevin Durand) has laid siege to the hospital in order to kill Grace and reap the rewards. Said rewards, explained by a lawyer played by Elijah Wood: as Grace won the previous game of hide and seek against a Satanic family unit, five more families will now have the chance to hunt her down and, uh, rule the world? They already seem to rule the world, but never mind that. Rules are rules.
Now, why doesn’t Bill just sneak up into Grace’s hospital room sight unseen—there’s zero security, and no one knows who he is anyway—and plant the axe directly in her head to claim his victory? Welcome to the most frustrating aspect of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. These Satanic loonies are armed with axes, machetes, samurai swords, pistols, sniper rifles, and even rocket launchers… but before they pull the trigger, they always announce themselves with theatric gusto and deliver a little monologue, allowing Grace and Faith ample time to run away. Often, they don’t even follow in pursuit.
Now, that doesn’t matter much for Bill, in any event, because Satan sure is a stickler for those rules: right before he can land the killing blow, he explodes in a puddle of gore. And so does the whole Wilkinson family. You can’t just kill Grace, Satan has apparently dictated through Wood’s lawyer: you gotta drug her, drop her off in the middle of a golf course defenseless and handcuffed to her sister, and then count to ten before starting pursuit.
This leaves four more families competing to kill Grace: the Danforth family, led by twins Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), the El Caido family, represented by Ignacio (Néstor Carbonell), The Wan family, led by Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), and the Rajan family, led by Viraj (Nadeem Umar-Khitab). The bulk of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is these characters, and others, chasing down Grace and Faith across a sprawling country estate, with precious few of the thrills or chills the original Ready or Not delivered.
That’s a shame, because it’s all rather well put together by the creative team behind the camera, with crisp widescreen cinematography by Brett Jutkiewicz, tight editing from Jay Prychidny, and a strong handle on horror-comedy displayed by Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett. But we never get a chance to invest in the story this time around, because we know what happens next every step of the way, without ever really understanding or caring why it happens. By the climax of the movie, as additional rules are explained to characters on both sides of conflict, we get the impression that they don’t really understand what’s going on here, either.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a well-crafted but noticeably diminished follow-up that struggles to justify its own existence beyond repetition. The filmmaking craft remains strong across the board, including some sharply executed action-horror staging and another committed, high-energy performance from Samara Weaving, but the narrative framework removes much of what made the original so effective.
By front-loading its logic and flattening its suspense, the film becomes more of a procedural chase than a genuinely escalating survival story. There are moments of grisly fun and technical precision, but without the unpredictability and momentum that defined the first film, Here I Come ultimately feels like it’s going through the motions rather than reinventing the game.
