Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come Review – Lackluster Comedy-Horror Sequel Plays A Weak Game

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Kathryn Newton and Samara Weaving bloodied and tied to chairs in Ready or Not 2 Here I Come

Published Mar 14, 2026, 6:50 AM EDT

Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

It's been about seven years since we met Samara Weaving's Grace Le Domas (née MacCaulley), the bloodied bride who somehow survived a game of satanic Hide and Seek in Ready or Not. In that time, the world's rich have only gotten richer, the poor poorer, and cynical, ironic, humor-and-gore-filled action flicks have only become more in vogue. The kind of genre fare that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett specialize in is both less cutting-edge and more prescient now than it was in 2019. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come doesn't meet the moment in either direction.

Ready or Not 2 is not unlike watching kids play laser tag. There's a lot of fighting, and chasing, and cracking jokes, but the end result feels inconsequential. It's a frustrating experience. It's not as if the first Ready or Not was all that incisive, but its delight in genre was still couched in a cogent capitalist critique. This sequel is all bluster, filled with lazy world building and cheap humor that frequently undercuts whatever genuine tension that precedes it, and is overly long for something that careens toward an inevitable conclusion.

Ready Or Not 2 Loses Its Own Game Through Poor Characterization & Lazy Plotting

Here I Come begins mere seconds after the first film ends, with Grace indulging in a cigarette as her in-laws' home burns to the ground behind her. But her victory is short-lived: She passes out quickly and winds up cuffed to a hospital bed, under the unsurprising assumption that she murdered an entire family. That's only one of her problems, however, as her estranged sister Faith (Newton) has shown up with several chips on her shoulder from a seven-year grudge she's harbored under the feeling that Grace abandoned her.

The two barely have any time to hash things out before the nightmare continues, and a new cavalry of entitled, wealthy sociopaths show up to mow them both down. As it turns out, the Le Domas family was one of six that sat on global counsel, all of whom owe their massive fortunes to the satanic Le Bail. The devil's advocate (Elijah Wood) puts the two sisters in a room with the remaining families to explain, in clunky exposition, that a rare clause in their collective contracts allows Grace to battle it out with the others for the coveted High Seat, which literally controls the entire world.

Under capitalism, everything is a game, including money and murder. Now, Grace and Faith also have to play; they live in the game. It's a frustratingly simple metaphor that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett hit entirely too hard. There's just nothing really here beyond that, and once you get it, there's nowhere left to go. You're just left with the exhausting experience of twiddling your thumbs until the next kill or bodily explosion.

If Ready or Not was a chess match, Here I Come is tic-tac-toe.

And that can be really fun, too, to be sure. There are a number of appreciably gross and hilariously goopy deaths in Ready or Not 2. But rooting for Grace in the sequel is a bit harder than in the first, because she is so out of her depth here, and not in control of her own destiny. Grace and Faith escape certain death so many times that it becomes comical – how can two people be so lucky?

If Ready or Not was a chess match, Here I Come is tic-tac-toe. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett have eschewed strong plot development and characterization for something that, in texture and structure, resembles the simple narrative of a video game cut-scene. The first film probably didn't need a sequel, but now that one exists, it would've been nice if it had raised the stakes – not just in terms of danger, but of what it might be able to say about the state of the world. Instead, the directors just play a game. One that doesn't do anything but reinforce the very thing it initially sought to satirize.