Ready or Not Two

I had only seen the first Ready or Not movie about a month ago and I loved it. It was a fun movie and I love badass girl cinema so when my roommate told me there was gonna be a second one with Buffy the Vampire Slayer I was immediately on board. Especially coming on the heels of the Buffy reboot cancellation I needed some Sarah Michelle Gellar and oh boy did she deliver.

First of all my roommate and I started a film podcast and this was our first official episode but I still wanted to put out my organized thoughts into a normal review.

I think the movie was incredible. It’s very good at what it does. They are fun movies, they aren’t meant to be profound, they aren’t meant to be anything more than entertainment. And they know it. Which means what they do well is these fight scenes, the costumes, the casting, all of the elements get to be perfectly what they are.

The casting to me felt like a Knives Out movie, in the sense that there were a lot of actors you’d recognize at different levels of fame which just does a really good job of adding texture and dynamics. This is further supported by the writing which did a wonderful job of giving all of these power families a lot of different relationship dynamics and motivations. It makes a film so much more interesting to watch when even your villains are layered and varied.

Now let me talk about Sarah Michelle Gellar, first of all she looked INCREDIBLE. That woman is beautiful and amazing and I LOVE when she’s mean. Cruel Intentions is one of my favorite films of all time. She had very similar energy in this film, extremely driven, determined, ruthless and hot. And over the course of the movie she gains more depth and that was really awesome to see one of the antagonists have an arc, but it wasn’t just her. Several of these villains had pretty in depth character arcs and it wasn’t at the expense of any of the action or any of the development the leading women went through. It only aided the film.

Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton play sisters and oh my dear were they written well. Truly, someone who really understands sibling dynamics wrote this script and this relationship. The way the movie explores this relationship is done really well because we are shown how stubborn these women are to be fighting with each other amidst trying to fight for their lives. And it's a very real reaction and it's very honest with how they explore their resentment for each other and break through it.

I thought the costuming was brilliant, having Samara in the same costume for the first one was great. And then having her fight another woman in a clean, fresh white wedding dress was genius. And the final look with both sisters in black dresses was drop dead gorgeous. They looked STUNNING.

And last but not least, perhaps the most fun part of the movie, the soundtrack. The soundtrack to this movie was really what tied the whole thing together. There are so many tones action scenes can deliver and they entirely depend on the soundtrack. The music tells us what the scene is supposed to feel like. And the team behind the music absolutely nailed it.

The movie is a 10/10 for what it was, a fun action-thriller perfect for girls night. If you want the overall, as it will be remembered as a film score I put it on par with the best Marvel movie which is a 7/10 in the greater landscape of film.