Review of Ready or Not (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Samara Weaving is what makes this film transcend its trashy, cliched components. She is quotable, trendy, lovely, spirited, and pulls every comic gag she can with her expressions. Despite her barnburner of a performance, the film suffers from incurable trailer fatigue. Almost every gruesome death and moment of suspense has been spoiled for you by the last few months of trailers, and the scenes that aren’t ruined are defused by the general premise of the game itself. The fact that the film ends when she’s caught and killed really lowers the stakes, because she’s covered in the world’s toughest plot armor imaginable. Instead of catching her, the story has to sort of half-catch her several times and then find improbable escapes for her.

This film was always working against the tide. Instead of casting Margot Robbie, it found someone who looked like Margot Robbie if you were half paying attention in between handfuls of popcorn down your trash hole during the trailers. It assembled a rag tag band of C-list actors and the legendary Andy MacDowell to hunt her down. The trailer gives us an idea that the large band of seekers is meant to put a comic twist on the horror genre, since its their body count that will rise through a series of unfortunate events, not hers. There’s certainly a space for turned-tables “Hunter Becomes Hunted” horror films where the protagonist finds a way to outsmart the evil consciousness in charge of (usually) her torture: think Green Room, Red Eye, Panic Room. I guess the more popular trope is something like the inverted Final Girl, which I love. I think your tolerance for this film hinges on how tired (or not) you are of the trope after having seen this trailer on heavy rotation.

Two of the things that were either terrible or interesting (Wife really liked this movie and I thought it was meh): the turn with the husband and the ending’s decision about the element of magic that governs the entire world of the movie. The husband plot is a bit of a spoiler, but not one worth hiding: he’s turned native by his family in the course of the film. We get the sense early on that he’s a bit of an amoral figure in the film, because of his unwillingness to have given his fiance much of a choice going into the wedding to begin with. There’s a conversation that the husband has with his mother while chained to a bed that makes for some interesting conversation, where she basically calls him out for acknowledging the curse of those who don’t go through with the game to begin with. One of the weaknesses of the film for me is how much of the decision-making of the husband and the rest of the family hinges on ad hoc exposition of past events that we have no knowledge of and no way of corroborating. We’re told, apropos of nothing, that all of the people who have refused to play a wedding game have inexplicably died. We’re also told that families who have failed to see a Game through to its ritualistic ending have met cruel fates beyond reckoning, but we have no way of knowing if any of it is true, and by the time we learn it, it seems inconsequential since we’ve already made moral judgements about the character’s motivations.

On the ending: it feels a little bit of an overcorrection to Shyamalan-twisty-Village-type endings, and a little too slapdash to work like Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods, which is, along with Tucker and Dale vs Evil, the Gold Standard for modern comic/horror films.

I came across this article that suggests the acquisition of Fox Searchlight by Disney may lead to a new path forward for horror films in the future.

I’m confident in telling you at this point, a month and a half after its release, that you do not need to seek this one out. It will find you when the time is right, probably on a plane, very possibly in the form of a joke DVD gift you receive around X-mas time, but possibly on a treadmill while working out.