Review: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, pervasive language and brief drug use

Score: 4 out of 5

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a bigger and badder movie than its predecessor, and while I'd hesitate to call it better, it's still a damn good time at the movies. It drops most of the horror from the premise in favor of cranking up both the bloody action and the soap opera camp, bringing in a slew of veteran character actors and former TV stars to play the assorted villains out to kill the protagonists in a plot that reminded me of nothing less than a parody of the John Wick movies, if not in their action scenes then certainly in their worldbuilding. It's an often ridiculous movie where you aren't quite sure if the plot holds together when you think about it, but the fact that it was happy to acknowledge its own ridiculousness and make it part of the joke helps it go down much smoother, especially when you've got a great cast and a director team who love making these kinds of violent, over-the-top horror-comedies. If you liked the original, you're probably gonna enjoy this one.

This movie starts right where the last one left off, with a bloodied, battered Grace Le Domas (née MacCaullay) stepping out of the mansion where her new husband and his wealthy family had tried to sacrifice her to Satan on her wedding night. Passing out from her injuries, she wakes up in the hospital handcuffed to her bed after the police drew the only logical conclusion about what the hell happened in the Le Domas household that night (because nobody's believing her story): that she probably murdered them all. Unfortunately, that's the least of her problems, because as it turns out, the Le Domases weren't the only super-rich family who'd made deals with the Devil for their fortune. The Council, an order of several other elite families, kidnap Grace and bring her to a country club resort in Rhode Island where they inform her that she's now going for Round Two, and what's more, they've dragged Grace's estranged sister Faith MacCaullay along for the ride, as Faith had been Grace's emergency contact and was with her at the hospital when they came to kidnap her.

What follows is more of the same, only on a bigger scale with more guns, more explosions, and more famous actors playing the villains. Given how much I enjoyed the last movie, I don't begrudge the filmmakers for more or less recycling what worked before and going for escalation rather than innovation, especially given that most of it still works here. Samara Weaving is still one of the best scream queens of her generation, and here, she proves that she could easily pivot to becoming an action hero if she wanted to. Grace is not an invincible badass, but somebody who frequently finds herself frustrated and outgunned by her pursuers and survives through her wits, her blue-collar grit, and exploiting the flaws of her pursuers, which are admittedly numerous. Many of them do not know how to use the various weapons, both archaic and modern, that they use to try and kill her, which means that the action scenes are played as much for comedy as they are for laughs, whether it's a man trying and failing to shoot Grace and Faith with a sniper rifle that he's constantly fumbling with, a woman trying to blow Grace up with a rocket launcher only to find out too late that she was aiming it the wrong way, or Grace and said woman both getting blinded by pepper spray and fumbling about as they try to kill each other. The film also serves up Kathryn Newton as Faith, Grace's haughty sister who looks down on her as a fuckup who had to marry into money to get ahead in life even though it's strongly hinted that she herself isn't as put-together as she lets on. Faith and Grace hate each other, but are still sisters at the end of the day, and Newton and Weaving did a great job selling me on their fraught relationship as they both struggle to survive and struggle to put their differences behind them.

As for the villains, the standouts here are Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy as the twins Ursula and Titus Danforth, the owners of the resort where much of the action goes down, and Elijah Wood as the mysterious lawyer for "Mr. Le Bail" who's organized the hunt. It was fun as hell seeing Gellar back in Cruel Intentions mode as a soapy rich-bitch villainess while at the same time putting her action chops from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to good use, and she makes the most of it, combining those two sides into one of the few people among the villains who actually seems to know what they're doing and takes what's going on seriously even if she does ultimately get a bit too cocky for her own good. Hatosy, meanwhile, made Titus one of the most legitimately terrifying characters in the movie. His own sister is scared of him, as was I at the thought of what might happen if he got his hands on Grace and Faith, making a big third-act twist sting that much harder (and lend the film some dark subtext about why some people might willingly make what seem like obviously terrible romantic decisions) given that his character was at the center of it. There are a lot of funny moments in this movie, but whenever Hatosy is on screen, shit gets scary real quick. Wood's character, despite also playing it straight for the most part, gets a lot more of the film's humor, specifically in his role as the referee, so to speak, who has a big book containing all the countless arcane rules governing the hunt that he frequently gets to crack open. Most of these rules are either for humor or to drive the plot forward, like the film's writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy had watched the John Wick movies, found their portrait of the criminal underworld ridiculous, and fused that with the first film's depiction of the elite as fairly ridiculous in general beneath all the luxury porn. And through it all, Wood maintains a straight face and acts like the one who holds all the cards even if he's not playing the game himself. The supporting characters are mostly cannon fodder, but they are entertaining cannon fodder, with a host of character actors like Néstor Carbonell, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, and Kevin Durand all giving them a ton of personality while the directors, the Radio Silence team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, give them plenty of opportunities to shine. Barring the Satanism and the behavior of Titus, most of the horror elements from the first movie have been dropped in favor of a greater focus on action, specifically in the vein of Die Hard as the emphasis is largely on Grace and Faith being on the back foot against villains who, while not the sharpest tools in the shed, are still very rich and very well-equipped. People get killed in creative ways, there is some great stuntwork and hand-to-hand fight scenes (especially a downright brutal one between Hatosy and Newton), and Radio Silence's favorite trick, people exploding in a shower of gore, comes out to play and then some.

The Bottom Line

It's more Ready or Not. If you liked the first movie, then you'll probably enjoy this just as well, as it is a wild, kick-ass ride that never lets up once it gets going and never takes itself too seriously. Once this hits home video, I can see somebody stitching together an edit of the two films together, and it will probably be awesome.