A More Dangerous — and Preposterous — Game

“Ready or Not,” the 2019 horror-comedy hit that turned “The Most Dangerous Game” into an aristocratic Victorian funhouse slasher movie, was nothing more (or less) than a well-executed piece of ultraviolent schlock. Yet there’s a funny way in which that movie has more resonance now than it did then. Its depiction of a clan of homicidal sickos, who in accordance with the family “rules” end up trying to murder their son’s new bride by dawn (she’s played by Samara Weaving, who comes on like a final-girl-gone-psycho version of Margot Robbie), anticipated our current fixation on the hidden horrors of the Epstein class.

Given all that, you’d expect the follow-up to be even timelier. And “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” a go-more-splattery-or-go-home sequel, is a film that very much taps into our vision of “the elites” as a global cabal of evil. It’s also more gruesomely over-the-top than “Ready or Not” (if that’s even possible), not to mention more operatic, more debased, more macabre, and more of a luridly preposterous cartoon. But all of that made it an ideal film to showcase to a crowd of screaming hellcats at SXSW, where the movie premiered tonight.

Is “Ready or Not 2” the bloody megaplex bash as knowing midnight movie? Does it combine honest laughs with a general invitation to crack up at its overboiled misanthropic cheesiness? Does it make up rules as it goes along? Yes and yes and yes, though we increasingly live in a movie world where all those things are attributes. “Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.

The film opens by replaying the final scene of “Ready or Not”: Samara Weaving’s Grace, drenched in blood and pierced with wounds, having dispatched the most threatening members of the La Domas family (the rest of them exploded into bloody smithereens — cursed by her having survived The Game), sits on the steps outside the mansion that’s going up in flames behind her. She lights a cigarette and takes a weary victory puff, at which point a rescue worker asks, “What happened to you?” She replies, “In-laws.” She is then taken to a Connecticut hospital, where she wakes up handcuffed to the bed, with a cop informing her that she is wanted for murder and arson.

But that’s just a red herring. At the clinic, Grace is reunited with her younger sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), who’s been estranged from her for seven years. Attacked by a coked-up goon who’s a harbinger of threats to come, Grace changes from her hospital duds back into her signature bloody wedding dress and dirty yellow sneakers, and that’s when she and Faith find themselves, bound and ball-gagged, sitting before the Council, a star chamber that consists of the representatives of six families, one of whom were the La Domases.

There’s another game afoot — or, at least, another Inviolable Rule dictated by the late Mr. Le Bail, who founded the La Domas fortune. (But why would his rules apply to other families? Oh, never mind.) A second dusk-till-dawn challenge looms: With the Le Domases gone, one member of each of the Council’s remaining clans must try to kill Grace. Whoever does will occupy the high seat and become the most powerful person on Earth. (If they fail, Grace will occupy the high seat.)

We meet the ailing old man who currently occupies that post — Chester Danforth, played by the legendary film director David Cronenberg, who makes his quizzical dourness felt for one scene. Chester has two adult twins, Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), who are theoretically aligned but will duke it out for power. The other families are represented by characters who are like suspects in a third-rate “Knives Out” movie. But once again: Are we laughing with or at what low-kitsch nitwits they are? Maybe there’s no longer any difference.

“Ready or Not,” set inside the La Domas mansion, had a compact trap-door video-game ingenuity. The action of “Ready or Not 2” sprawls all over the grounds that make up the Council compound, and for a while the film is a ham-handed and rather scattershot slaughter fest. Viraj (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), a stoned club hound, proves to be a bumbler with a shotgun; other would-be assassins strike out in comparable ways. This gives Grace and Faith, between attempted killings, a chance to air their differences and engage in some sisterly therapy. But their relationship, as dramatized by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy’s screenplay, is overdone and unconvincing. Faith despises Grace…for having “abandoned” her by going off to college. For years, both have been living in New York City…without any awareness of the fact. Are we supposed to believe any of this? It’s just a mechanism. The film’s co-directors, Matt Bettillini-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who made the first film (which won them the right to direct the rebooted “Scream” and “Scream VI”), are kinesthetic gamesmen who are also one-dimensional psychologists.             

Yet they know how to bang the thriller puzzle pieces together, and to stage a scene of personal combat so that you feel the existential viciousness. At one point, they get two ultraviolent duels going at once: Grace facing off against Francesca (Maia Jae), who was originally engaged to Alex La Domas (it’s a cat fight on steroids), while the depraved rich boy Titus, in another locale, shows his murderous colors, the whole double fight set to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (are you laughing yet?). Titus and Ursula make tasty villains, with Sarah Michelle Gellar turning up the icy hauteur, and Shawn Hatosy amusingly evoking the entitled blankness of George W. Bush. Standing above it all is Elijah Wood as the Council lawyer, who seems to be silently smirking at everything that happens, which is not an inappropriate response.  

It all climaxes with another wedding, this one unfolding in the church of Satan. It’s a scene that suggests “Eyes Wide Shut” as remade by Jerry Bruckheimer, and in that sense you could say that it taps into current obsessions. Will “Ready or Not 2” satisfy the audience that made “Ready or Not” a hit? No doubt. The way Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett work, the film has enough pulp craft to walk the line between violence and camp. Weaving, even more than before, makes Grace an ingénue gone banshee. But if there’s ever a “Ready or Not 3,” it would be good to see the elites in it do something that’s as interesting as it is brutal.