READY OR NOT (2019)

This review contains spoilers.

Seems like a simple premise, but it actually takes a fair amount of Lore (derogatory) to get it off the drawing board, and even then it requires a fair amount of narrative handwaving to make it feel plausible. Once it gets going, it's passable fun—Samara Weaving deserves her spot in the pantheon of scream queens—though the ending kind of disappoints. [Spoilers commence.] Liquidating half the cast in a single scene has a go-for-broke quality that could feel delirious in a different kind of movie, but if you've gone to the trouble of creating a revenge structure filled with some memorable antagonists (Nicky Guadagni stands out as the weird aunt), why skip the part where the protagonist picks them all off with memorable kills? Outsourcing those kills to the ex machina feels a bit like a cop-out, no matter how much CGI gore splatters on the lens—ultimately, it's Lore that saves the day, which means that our protagonist succeeds mostly by just surviving till the end of the run-time. I guess that's an inherent danger of the premise—it's how Hide and Seek works, after all—but it's not too hard to reimagine this with a final act where the Seekers become the Hiders, and the end result would have been, to my mind, more satisfying.

A ★★½ review of Ready or Not (2019)

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