Here is some funny/concerning/fitting Inside Baseball for our readers: when writing these reviews, I actually write somewhat backwards. I do the Ups And Downs first, then the Overall, and then I come up here to do my preamble and short synopsis. Well today, after finishing the U&D and Overall, I checked the word count just to see where we were, and it was 666.

That will surely change after I do my editing and proofreading for those sections, but still… Mr. LaBael would be proud.

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come is one of those sequels that picks up immediately where its originator leaves off. As Ready Or Not came to a close, we saw a defiant and still-alive Grace outside the burning La Domas family mansion lighting up a cigarette and trying to take in the night’s activities. And it is there that we find her to start the sequel.

After passing out and briefly flatlining in the ambulance, Grace wakes up in a nearby hospital and finds herself under suspicion for the deaths of all of the La Domases. Her sister Faith–Grace’s emergency contact–has also been called in to town.

The detective leaves Grace and Faith to start their tense reunion, but they barely get to acknowledge each other before a madman breaks into the hospital… and he’s out to kill Grace! After some cat-and-mouse, the crazed would-be killer has Grace dead to rights… when he explodes just like her in-laws did the previous night!

Grace and Faith are then abducted from the hospital and brought before the attorney/representative-on-Earth for Mr. LaBael who informs them that by surviving Hide And Seek and killing the La Domases, Grace has caused quite a stir in an underground empire. And she will again need to survive a harrowing experience if she is going to get any answers…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Kathryn Newton injects some serious life into this sequel and proves to be exactly what the movie needed to keep things as fresh as possible. Her character of Faith is very believable as she is inserted into the madness of Grace’s life. Newton makes her funny and sympathetic and relatable. Her chemistry with Samara Weaving is impeccable, and Newton herself remains an actress on the rise for whom I will watch anything. 

It’s possible that the relationship this movie establishes for Faith and Grace is a little forced. The movie needed to explain why Faith and Grace would love and fight for each other, but also why Faith was not at the wedding in part one… and that ends up proving a smidge tricky to navigate. But that’s more on the screenwriting and the fact that Ready Or Not surely wasn’t planned to have a sequel when it was written. Newton does everything admirably and handles the choppy waters with aplomb.

+ The build up of the mythology around the Mr. LaBael character and the universe under and surrounding him is a good idea. We get some new wrinkles and rules and ideas, as well as the concept that there are several families tied into him as his religion. It keeps the mythos of the previous film and develops on them. 

The idea that Mr. LaBael has several families under his thrall makes sense after what we saw in part one. There is a conceit that his influence over the world is virtually limitless (we see one of the heads of one of his families end a war with a phone call), which might be a bit much to swallow, but it establishes what this sequel wants to: that he is someone to be respected and feared. This movie makes much more use of Mr. LaBael than its predecessor did, thereby embiggening the world the screenwriters are crafting.

– I would rather the sequel had done something other than “Hide And Seek Again”. It’s what I call the Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey Premise: if you can come up with a great idea for a movie, you can come up with a great idea for a sequel that isn’t just doing the same movie over again. I would have liked a slightly fresher concept for this one. This was my primary concern when I started seeing the advertising for Ready Or Not 2, and it was unfortunately borne out in the picture.

The premise of the first film seemed to be that the La Domas family had to live and die by their own sword: being a gaming empire. So it made sense that they had to play the Hide And Seek game. But why would all of these other families be tied into that? Why couldn’t the clause that Grace triggered by surviving the La Domases have been violence and mayhem in some other format? I’m knocking the screenwriters here for not straying far enough from their previous well-worn path when there had to be other options available.

– I have been a fan of Nestor Carbonell’s since the 2001 The Tick series, and I was excited to see him here. When I have seen him pop up in other films since then, it always elicits a positive reaction from me. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a lot to do in this movie and isn’t used to his maximum potential. He has good comedy chops, but doesn’t get many laughs in Ready Or Not 2. I wanted more Batmanuel! 

OVERALL

The biggest knock against Ready Or Not 2 is surely that it tries to do what the first movie did, just bigger. I’d really rather it tried to be its own thing. But aside from that, it is plenty of fun as a movie, and the addition of Kathryn Newton is a huge one. Give me an entire cinematic universe of her and Weaving playing roles tied to each other. Basically, if you liked Ready Or Not–and I did–you’ll find little to dislike about its successor.