Right here I Come Evaluate – Lackluster Comedy-Horror Sequel Performs A Weak Sport

It has been about seven years since we met Samara Weaving’s Grace Le Domas (née MacCaulley), the bloodied bride who by some means survived a recreation of satanic Cover and Search in Prepared or Not. In that point, the world’s wealthy have solely gotten richer, the poor poorer, and cynical, ironic, humor-and-gore-filled motion flicks have solely turn into extra in vogue. The sort of style fare that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett specialise in is each much less cutting-edge and extra prescient now than it was in 2019. Prepared or Not 2: Right here I Come would not meet the second in both course.

The actors, a minimum of, are up for the problem of this sequel. Weaving is simply as effortlessly charming and eminently susceptible as ever, and Kathryn Newton is a pure addition. The 2 play off one another nicely, and might hardly be blamed for a script which has them ceaselessly preventing over the identical buried resentment in scene after scene. Round them is a humiliation of appearing riches – Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Pitt‘s Shawn Hatosy, physique horror maestro David Cronenberg, Elijah Wooden – all of whom are nice in ranges of delectable villainy. However the film is a vapid mess with nothing to saynor something so as to add to its personal, beforehand established concepts.

Prepared or Not 2 is just not not like watching youngsters play laser tag. There’s loads of preventing, and chasing, and cracking jokes, however the finish end result feels inconsequential. It is a irritating expertise. It isn’t as if the primary Prepared or Not was all that incisive, however its enjoyment of style was nonetheless couched in a cogent capitalist critique. This sequel is all bluster, crammed with lazy world constructing and low cost humor that steadily undercuts no matter real rigidity that precedes it, and is overly lengthy for one thing that careens towards an inevitable conclusion.

Prepared Or Not 2 Loses Its Personal Sport By means of Poor Characterization & Lazy Plotting

Right here I Come begins mere seconds after the primary movie ends, with Grace indulging in a cigarette as her in-laws’ house burns to the bottom behind her. However her victory is short-lived: She passes out shortly and winds up cuffed to a hospital mattress, beneath the unsurprising assumption that she murdered a whole household. That is solely considered one of her issues, nevertheless, as her estranged sister Religion (Newton) has proven up with a number of chips on her shoulder from a seven-year grudge she’s harbored beneath the sensation that Grace deserted her.

The 2 barely have any time to hash issues out earlier than the nightmare continues, and a brand new cavalry of entitled, rich sociopaths present as much as mow them each down. Because it seems, the Le Domas household was considered one of six that sat on international counsel, all of whom owe their large fortunes to the satanic Le Bail. The satan’s advocate (Elijah Wooden) places the 2 sisters in a room with the remaining households to elucidate, in clunky exposition, {that a} uncommon clause of their collective contracts permits Grace to battle it out with the others for the coveted Excessive Seat, which accurately controls the whole world.

Beneath capitalism, every thing is a recreation, together with cash and homicide. Now, Grace and Religion additionally need to play; they reside within the recreation. It is a frustratingly easy metaphor that Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett hit completely too laborious. There’s simply nothing actually right here past that, and when you get it, there’s nowhere left to go. You are simply left with the exhausting expertise of twiddling your thumbs till the subsequent kill or bodily explosion.

And that may be actually enjoyable, too, to make certain. There are a variety of appreciably gross and hilariously goopy deaths in Prepared or Not 2. However rooting for Grace within the sequel is a bit tougher than within the first, as a result of she is so out of her depth right here, and never answerable for her personal future. Grace and Religion escape sure demise so many instances that it turns into comical – how can two individuals be so fortunate?

If Prepared or Not was a chess match, Right here I Come is tic-tac-toe. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett have eschewed robust plot growth and characterization for one thing that, in texture and construction, resembles the easy narrative of a online game cut-scene. The primary movie in all probability did not want a sequelhowever now that one exists, it will’ve been good if it had raised the stakes – not simply by way of hazard, however of what it’d be capable to say in regards to the state of the world. As a substitute, the administrators simply play a recreation. One that does not do something however reinforce the very factor it initially sought to satirize.

Prepared or Not 2: Right here I Come screened on the 2026 SXSW Movie & TV Competition and releases large in theaters on March 20.