‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’ Review: A Sensational Samara Weaving Can’t Save This Ho-Hum Horror Sequel

They say every time Samara Weaving belts out her one-of-a-kind scream in a horror film, an angel gets its wings. Or, as would be more accurate for the genre, a devil gets its horns. This was true in “Ready or Not,” the darkly, devilishly fun 2019 horror romp where Weaving played Grace, a working-class woman who marries into a wealthy family desperately maintaining their iron grip on money and power via a deal with the mysterious Mr. Le Bail, who, as it turns out, is the literal embodiment of Satan. 

However, putting aside the prince of darkness, the standout of the film was Weaving as she cemented her status as a memorable modern scream queen and joyously compelling action star. Her aforementioned scream, in particular, remains an all-timer, feeling like it is exorcising a deep, primal fear just as it rattles you in your seat. Much as Grace had to battle her way through a nightmarish game of hide and seek where she must survive being hunted by her murderous new “family” until sunrise, Weaving was able to fight against most of that film’s prevailing limitations and come out on the other side in one piece. Even when everything then went to bloody pieces all around her, resulting in a wonderfully gruesome and explosive gag of an ending, she held it all together.  

One would think that another film that provided more of Weaving, her boundless charisma, sly humor, and shattering scream would be tough to fumble. Yet somehow “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” a surprisingly safe sequel that picks up right where its predecessor left off yet goes in disappointingly few new interesting directions of its own, manages to do plenty of fumbling. It’s bigger and boasts a larger ensemble, including those played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, and, briefly, a delightful David Cronenberg, whom Weaving must again do battle with. Though just as the scope expands, the creativity shrinks, leaving Weaving having to do even more heavy lifting as the film merely feels like it’s going through the motions we’ve all already seen done better the first time. It’s got more moments of properly gruesome silliness, but little in the way of meaningful thematic bite, engaging action, or well-shot horror. While Weaving is sensational once more, managing to make the most of what little she has to work with through almost a sheer force of will, it’s a film you’d rather just say “not” to, while sticking with the original. 

Directed by the returning duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett from a screenplay by the also-returning Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, the film opens where “Ready or Not” closed with the great in-laws’ kicker. This line, which could have easily felt like a hacky, womp womp comedy moment, was given life via the wearied and deadpan manner with which the blood-covered Weaving delivered it, ensuring that it wrapped back around to being genuinely inspired. Such inspiration is profoundly lacking here as “Ready or Not 2” immediately finds itself awkwardly building off of this by showing Grace then passing out following this joke and being taken to a hospital. With each shock of a defibrillator, we catch brief glimpses of memorable, more genuinely menacing highlights from the first film. This second one doesn’t do itself any favors by reminding us of the strengths that made its predecessor such a hit, but there is at least something effectively streamlined about how it drops these reminders into the opening. Alas, we then arrive at a hospital where everything grinds to a halt, and we get an exposition dump on everything that happened before this anyway. The film keeps explaining itself to you over and over, though rarely do you actually feel anything like the jolt of energy the first had. 

It’s at the hospital where Grace is soon interrogated by a detective, who at first, looks almost like he’s being played by Jemaine Clement (unfortunately, he isn’t), reconnects with her estranged sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), who she still had as her emergency contact, explains what it was that happened to her, and then gets roped back into the same cat-and-mouse game she just only barely survived. Only this time, it’s not marriage that’s on the table, but the High Seat of the Council (which basically provides control of the world) that four families are now trying to take for themselves. Whoever kills Grace and Faith will be the one sitting in the chair, though, again, if they survive til sunrise, all of the rival family members will explode into bloody pulp. We see plenty more of these explosions, but where the first film used them as an incredibly satisfying payoff, the sequel keeps going back again and again to the bloody well to diminishing results. 

Much of this, save for a smattering of more darkly playful jokes, like one where we see how Cronenberg’s bedridden patriarch can wield immediate power with a single phone call, or everything surrounding Elijah Wood’s wacky little evil lawyer overseeing it all, proves oddly tiresome. Where “Ready or Not” pretty much got right down to the fun, “Ready or Not 2” does more stumbling about, punctuated with bloody explosions that don’t quite hit as hard as they did the first time. That it treats the original film with a strange reference, including in one baffling scene where Grace dons her bloody wedding gown and yellow high-top shoes like she’s a superhero suiting up for battle, just further strains credulity when it doesn’t put in the same work to making a case for its own existence. Where “Ready or Not” felt genuinely fresh and fun in how it smashed together familiar genre elements, “Ready or Not 2” just rinses and repeats so much of it. It’s not ever really scary or tense with the greatest fear you feel coming not from the film, but from its creators who seem to be averse to taking any real risks. 

It’s still often fun to see Weaving cook, especially in how she’ll underplay key scenes for comedic effect, but most of the film gets lost in the woods of the massive resort Grace and Faith must navigate. It cycles through the increasingly tiresome patterns of the duo running, getting caught, engaging in stiffly staged and shot fight sequences, and then running again while some expositional details about their estrangement get awkwardly teased out. It’s not boring per se, as there is always plenty that is happening, but it is fairly basic, often falling back on predictable contrivances to keep things moving. There are some betrayals, twists, and revelations, though the actual construction of the film leaves you largely uninvested in them when they arise. The cinematography feels flat and drab, with few interesting compositions that stick out in the mind. 

This is a shame, as a resort, especially one with a golf course, is ripe for great cinema to be made using it as a backdrop. Such places are pristine and beautiful, though also frighteningly artificial, often masking a simmering violence. Unfortunately, there is so little in the way of visual panache to be found in “Ready or Not 2” in how it uncovers this. All it ends up betraying is the film’s painful lack of anything resembling audaciousness in either its technical or thematic elements. There just isn’t much of anything here to hold onto save for Weaving’s performance. The addition of Newton doesn’t add any noteworthy bits other than superficial sibling bickering and a forced sentimentality the film doesn’t earn. Where the original thrived in its simplicity, most of the expansions this sequel makes feel like clutter and take away from the strong core character.

Weaving does get one moment towards the end where she’s able to offer something a bit more layered with a choice nobody expected Grace to make, complicating what the entire film was all about. Alas, this comes far too late to leave much of an impression. Instead, it does another retread of the ending we already saw the first time. Blood goes everywhere, but there is no real heart behind it. For a horror film ostensibly about finding a way to play the game of life on your own terms and not by the cruel rules of the wealthy, it’s disappointing how much “Ready or Not 2” delivers more of the same but worse. Even when it does bite down, there’s no teeth to it. All you’re left with is the echo of what was better before. You watch only able to wish Weaving was given more to work with than this, or, at the very least, greater room for her iconic scream to rattle you once more.

Grade: C

“Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Searchlight Pictures releases the film on March 19.