In an almost entirely empty theatre on a Tuesday night, my friend and I watched all 108 minutes of Ready or Not 2 in a state of complete confusion. We got about halfway through the film before its sheer absurdity started to get old, and the plot unhinged. The original Ready or Not has a pretty simple premise: a girl marries into a family that secretly worships a satanic cult and has to survive until dawn. The stakes in this sequel, however, are raised to a laughable degree. Immediately following the ending of the first film, our main character Grace (Samara Weaving) is abducted from the hospital, along with her sister, by her ex-fiancé’s extended family. Trapped in a sprawling estate of an elite, one-percenters-murder-club, Grace isn’t just surviving for her life, but also for control over the world. Like, total control. Over the entire world. By wearing a ring. It isn’t at all explained how this is possible, sustained or achieved in the first place. The only real insight we get into the mechanics of this power is when the patriarch of the family tells his butler to call a ceasefire on some unspecified Middle Eastern war from his hospital bed.

So the stakes are high, and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have set the scene for some political commentary—a sort of Knives Out critique of this wealthy and supremely powerful family. But this throughline is thoroughly overpowered by the core conflict of the movie: the strained relationship between Grace and her sister Faith (Kathryn Newton). Their taut relationship is due to Grace leaving Faith behind in foster care to start her own life in New York, and this somehow triumphs over the looming prospect of total global power and the horde of murderous billionaires actively chasing after them with guns, swords and a rocket launcher. While it is possible to balance broader themes with an interpersonal struggle, Ready or Not 2 fails to make either plots compelling or convincing. The sisterly feud is also entirely thematically distanced from their situation; there is no correlation or common thread to ground this tension.

Frankly, it’s quite hard to care about their relationship, and it feels intensely misguided for this to be so heavily prioritised over global conflict. The implication that reconciliation between the sisters is more important than the political state of the world in sum only furthers my conviction that this film is incredibly surface level and lazily executed—to the point of prejudice.

The new families introduced in this sequel are almost exclusively characterised by their ethnicity. The Chinese businesswoman Wan Cheng Xing (Olivia Cheng) falls into the “Fu Manchu” archetype—a Western caricature in film portraying a Chinese character as cunning, successful and ruthless, and thus a cultural threat. Viraj Rajan represents the Indian family and is ridiculed for being idiotic and intellectually inferior, largely due to his unfamiliarity with the English language. On the other hand, the successors to the late Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg), the patriarch who dies at the beginning of the film, are intelligent and capable, and coincidentally white. Additionally, one of these successors claims that “there are no good or evil people, just the system.” While this is a continuation of the primary message from the first movie, it feels rudimentary here, as there is little grounding context provided surrounding these “systems” they function under.

If at this point you are interested in the dynamics of these families or confused about the plot, so was I. The amount of lore and law in this film is almost impossible to parse through, even with the walking talking exposition that is Elijah Wood’s character (the unnamed family lawyer). Yes, Elijah Wood does star in another movie about a corrupting ring, and in spite of everything going on in this movie he is delightful. 

To truly convey how ridiculous this movie is, let me run you through a scene. Francesca El Caido (Maia Jae) is a young woman jealous over Grace’s ex-fiancé (the murderous one who died in the first movie) and is intent on killing her for this sole reason (she literally doesn’t care about world domination, she’s just jealous). The scene is as follows:

Francesca (pointing a rocket launcher at Grace): Hi cunt.

Grace looks at her.

Francesca: Bye cunt.

Francesca fires the launcher, but it’s facing the wrong direction and the whole room explodes. Both of them lose their sight momentarily and stumble around the room trying to hit each other for five whole minutes. 

Aside from corny dialogue, a lack of character depth and an obscene amount of gun misfires, there are also noticeable continuity errors. A character who sliced open their hand two scenes before now has no mark of it. A character’s clothes are bloody in one scene and considerably less bloody in the next. Despite a budget of 14 million USD, this movie feels lazily produced. Faith maintains a Tumblr level messy bun and Grace gets a weapon shoved clean through her chest and walks it off in the next five minutes.

My main issue with this film, however, is the attempt to balance humour with intensely worrying acts of violence, creating a disturbing tonal inconsistency. Titus Danforth, played by The Pitt’s Shawn Hatosy, is the main bad guy and he certainly lives up to this role. While the aforementioned rocket launcher scene is occurring, Titus is brutally beating up Faith, verbally assaulting her and promising that he is going to “do things” to her later. What things? What are they implying? Towards the climax of the film, he forces an aggressive kiss on Grace. This sits at odds with the tone they go for at other times, when the characters make sarcastic quips while being chased by bloodthirsty killers. The film really needed to pick a tone and stick with it. This inconsistency is also reflected in the visuals. The gothic aesthetics of the final scenes are at complete odds with the rest of the film, and it feels like the directors only remembered the Satanic aspect of the plot at the last minute.

Nevertheless, one makeover, conveniently placed weapons cache and an unparalleled number of ‘fucks’ later, the movie ended. Fatal injuries are no longer of consequence and Grace gains the ring that makes you king of the world then throws it away. This movie had the potential to be a campy slasher or a serious horror, but it couldn’t pull off both. I have an entire list of gripes with this movie that didn’t even make the cut for this review, so I was thoroughly confused when I saw the mostly positive reviews on Letterboxd and IMDb. The acting was nothing special, it wasn’t visually striking, it was at once surface level and unnecessarily complicated, and so predictable that I guessed correctly the exact order in which each character would die. It feels symptomatic of a larger shift in the entertainment industry, where mainstream films are becoming increasingly unoriginal cash grabs. I have no doubt that this film will sink into the ether of unmemorable horror comedies, but it will continue to haunt me.