Action Thriller Ready or Not Begins Streaming on Netflix

Coined in 2009 by TV producer and comic book writer John Rogers, competence porn is an informal subgenre of entertainment built around watching characters who are genuinely good at their jobs. Rogers’ own show Leverage is a primary example of this, but fans also point at Star Trek: The Next Generation, some Batman stories via Polygon, Project Hail Mary, Ocean’s Eleven, and Fargo. There is a peculiar satisfaction in well-depicted adequacy, which probably says something about our historical moment.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which is now available for streaming on Hulu, is the precise opposite of that.

Ready or Not 2 is a movie about a squadron of people forced to work outside their core competencies because they do not have any. That does not mean they are not dangerous, but it is often not in the way they would like to be. In the age of the Business Idiot, watching the sons and daughters of privilege instantly crash and burn provides a dark thrill that drives much of Ready or Not 2.

As it is a direct sequel, discussing Ready or Not 2 requires disclosing parts of 2019’s Ready or Not. Some spoilers follow.

In the original Ready or Not, Grace, played by Samara Weaving, discovers on her wedding night that her new husband’s family owe their wealth and privilege to a demonic pact. As part of that pact, Grace is set loose on the family estate and hunted down as a human sacrifice. Grace survives, while her former in-laws do not.

The next day, Grace wakes up in the hospital, and local police suspect her of multiple homicides. Worse, her estranged sister Faith, played by Kathryn Newton, whom Grace forgot was still her emergency contact, shows up to further escalate the situation.

The complication multiplies because Grace’s dead in-laws belonged to an international coalition of influential families, all descendants of people who gained power through Satan worship. Grace and Faith are abducted and used as quarry in a new version of the game. Four representatives from each family must hunt and kill Grace to attain her dead in-laws’ power. One of these hunters is played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in a rare evil role resembling a grown-up version of her character from Cruel Intentions.

There is a certain John Wick-style escalation at work here, turning a simple concept—the devil requires murdering a new daughter-in-law—into urban fantasy myth-building where the modern world is controlled by devil worshippers with an elaborate legal code. That premise sounds silly if you pause to think about it.

Fortunately, Ready or Not 2 never slows down. Instead, it leans heavily into the first movie’s core joke: these people have the best of everything and suck at all of it, including premeditated homicide. It operates as a splatterpunk comedy of errors packed with wild kills, gallons of blood, and some of the deliberately worst fights in cinematic history.

Several negative reviews of Ready or Not 2 accuse it of being more of the same, but that criticism is reductive. The first Ready or Not functions largely as a shaggy-dog joke about a new bride’s inability to get along with her husband’s family, building toward its final line of dialogue. Ready or Not 2 focuses much more on class war, pitting a couple of borderline-homeless orphans against a roster of global elites forced by the Devil to get their own hands dirty.

The result is one of the highest-budget drive-in movies on record, featuring more of everything without losing sight of its core fun. Grace and Faith find themselves trapped in a country club rather than a mansion, facing more armed pursuers and higher stakes. Most importantly, Ready or Not 2 tosses blood around with the glee of an old episode of You Can’t Do That on Television, complete with human detonations timed for maximum effect. It makes for an entertaining night at the movies for anyone interested in watching the idle rich get thrown into a metaphorical wood chipper.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is now available for streaming via Hulu.

Source: Polygon