Movie Team-Ups present Ant-Man’s daughter AND Bill S. Preston, Esq.’s daughter!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Radio Silence is here for all your action-horror needs! The joint sobriquet for the directing duo of Tyler Gillett and Matt Bellinelli-Olpin, their slickly paced, tongue-in-cheek set-pieces — often flooded in literal gallons of blood — caught my attention with the fifth and sixth Screams and the vampire-kidnapping murder-mischief of Abigail even though rivers of carnage aren’t a go-to for me (…he said in an era when over half the films in theaters are fiscally modest horror flicks). Curious for more, I eventually went back and streamed their 2019 crowd-favorite Ready or Not, in which the impressively put-upon newlywed Samara Weaving learns the truth behind the old joke about how in-laws are the worst and is forced to survive “The Most Dangerous Game” by her new family’s regional variant rules, which include old-timey weapons, demonic rituals, and EXPLOSIONS. She survives to see dawn and overcomes one of modern America’s worst fears: spoiled one-percenters who were totally out to get her.

Weaving, the directors, and the first one’s writers R. Christopher Murphy and Guy Busick (who also worked on Silence’s last three films) are back with Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which naturally has to double and triple every quantity: higher stakes, more killers, more recognizable costars, and overall super-sized Hunger Games with larger industrial hoses hooked to those same chemical-factory-sized blood-vats.

The Gist:When last we left Our Heroine, Weaving’s newly widowed Grace was exhausted, bloodied, and relaxing with a cigarette. The sequel continues that final scene as first responders swarm the mansion and she collapses unconscious on the front steps. Her much-needed reward of a long hospital stay is interrupted by an unexpected visitor. In the last film she claimed she had no other family of her own, but (retcon alert!) she was lying-by-omission and wasn’t counting “relatives who are DEAD TO ME”. Kathryn Newton (Abigail, Quantumania) shows up as her estranged kid sister Faith, who’s none too happy that Grace never updated her “emergency contact” info. The next ninety minutes could’ve just been them yelling at each other, but this isn’t that kind of film about sisters overcoming their grudges and bonding over radio oldies.

Unfortunately for them, Grace’s in-laws were actually just one of six Slytherin-ish families whose joint secret society rules the world. With Grace as the sole survivor of her in-laws’ entire lineage, a bit of helter-skelter pandemonium leads to her and Faith being kidnapped and forced to play “The Most Dangerous Game: Master Edition” at a palatial, evacuated estate with the senior representatives of the other five families. Once again she has to survive till sundown and should have more places to hide in all that unsupervised square footage, but this time there’re also more rules and more hunters after her…not to mention Faith, who’s a first-time quarry. Their pursuers are chasing the grandest of all grand prizes: winner gets to rule the world. Grace takes nearly the entire runtime to realize this feral foofaraw kindasorta implies she might technically get to rule the world. If only she’d been allowed to read the rulebook before they began.

The familiar faces: Slayer supreme Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy (The Pitt, The Faculty) are the clear front-runners, athletic fraternal twins who make a great team till one turns more vicious than the other. Horror legend David Cronenberg (last seen acting in a few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery!) is their dad who’s far too frail for the big game and bows out in a cold-bloodedly logical fashion.

Nestor Carbonell (The Tick, Shogun) leads the most Latino family. Abigail‘s musclebound Kevin Durand is a coked-up head-of-household beach-bully who thinks the rules don’t apply to him. Players for the other teams waiting their turn on the bench include Gen V supporters Maia Jae (Emma’s influencer ex-friend Justine) and Dan Beirne (“Social Media Jeff”). Barely representing for local law enforcement is Grant Nickalls, one of the equally unhelpful racist cops from IT: Welcome to Derry.

Presiding over the proceedings is former hobbit Elijah Wood as the nameless attorney who represents their supernatural overlord “Le Bail”, as name-checked in the first one. He’s the rulebook reader, the judge and referee, and the most wicked smiler around. Wood is clearly having a ball.

The Impressions: As with the last one, the slasher-flick reverse-gimmick here is the killers wildly outnumber the potential victims. It’s basically Murder Olympics, with the sides not as unevenly matched as they should be. Grace learned a lot of hard lessons the first time around and wasn’t given any time to forget them. Meanwhile, the wealthy would-be warriors after her — who the rules say must take the field themselves and cannot have henchmen pinch-hitting for them — haven’t had to get their own hands dirty in ages and didn’t have much time for training before game day. Some barely know how to use their weapons of choice.

Weaving the reigning “Final Woman” is as cunning and resourceful as she was last time, and benefits from generously sharing the stage here because now she has someone to bounce off of in between surreptitious crawls, scrounging for defensive implements, and searching the occasional loser’s body for more cigarettes. She and Newton evoke a believably seesawing, sisterly chemistry as they rediscover each other, have more than a few screaming matches, hash out their wounds dating back to childhood, and eventually team up against the real threats.

But mostly Here I Come is an efficiently action-packed, giddily black-humored free-for-all punctuated with Looney Tunes artillery malfunctions, the varying responses as each competitor is summoned into the fray (sure enough, at least one bespoke braggart is a craven coward), and a few distinctive set pieces to differentiate it from devolving into a John Wick knockoff with wider rivers of blood despite there being fewer combatants on hand. (The most hilarious is a wedding-ballroom throwdown between two duelists both blinded by pepper spray.) The High Table-ish game mechanics threaten to bog down in mythos-making, but Wood keeps things light and lively even while he’s rigidly gamekeeping for as long as possible, until the final act writes everyone into a corner that can only be escaped through a rules “loophole” that, again, could’ve been invoked much sooner if more than two people had read the rulebook, or the rules scrolls, or the Ready-or-Not-cronomicon or whatever.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Ready or Not 2: Here I Come end credits, but we learn the families’ weapons were provided by Movie Arms Group, so now you know who to turn to for axes, surplus sniper rifles, and rocket launchers. Just make sure you ask for the instruction manuals with those so you know which end to point toward the target.