Ready or Not (2019)
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
A young bride's wedding night turns into her worst nightmare when her ridiculously rich in-laws force her to play a gruesome game of hide-and-seek.
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With their mix of upper-class pomposity and casual bloodshed, the Le Domas family calls to mind a rich tradition of blackhearted drawing room farces, from Kind Hearts and Coronets to Clue.
Rather than delivering on the promise of the premise, “Ready or Not” lurches unevenly and a bit smugly through the twisty halls of the Le Domases’ “Clue”-like mansion, with little of the 1985 murder-comedy’s boundless charm.
Ready or Not, as a friend so pointedly put it, is Clue if it took place during The Purge.
The underloved Clue is in the DNA of Ready or Not, in which a bunch of people who think they’re smarter than they actually are bumble through a sprawling Gothic mansion.
Instead, they’re like the cast of an ultraviolent remake of Clue, and if that’s not a glowing recommendation what is?
Ready of Not takes the best and most crowd pleasing elements of The Most Dangerous Game, Your’re Next, The Purge, and Clue and blends them into a tasty, bloody smoothie.
Not quite; its third act occasionally shuffles cards when it should be building to a crescendo, and its expansive cast of characters is so winningly performed that you almost wish you could get to know them a bit better amidst the breakneck pace (in both of these regards, it falls somewhat short of Adam Wingarde’s brilliant, thematically similar You’re Next).
Whilst comparisons to Adam Wingard’s under appreciated horror gem You’re Next are inevitable, Ready or Not ultimately punctures similarities by posing the question of what to believe when it comes to the supposed curse the family believe they are under.
Comparisons to Adam Wingard’s cult favorite You’re Next are hard to avoid.
In many ways, this one reminded me of Adam Wingard’s You’re Next , which I also had issues with.
Dirigida por Matt Bettinelli-Olpin y Tyler Gillett ( “Devil's Due”, segmento 10/31/98 de VHS ), Ready or Not recuerda algo a You're Next (Adam Wingard, 2011).
For a more sharper comparison, this movie could’ve been closer to the style of Adam Wingard’s You’re Next and felt like a remarkable moment for the genre.
This lurid, comical blend of "Rosemary's Baby," "The Most Dangerous Game" and Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" begins with a flashback that reveals a bit too much of what bride-to-be Grace (Samara Weaving) is about to experience.
Yet while The Hunt was canceled because it too explicitly adhered to red-blue political divides — pitting billionaire liberal elites straight out of a Josh Hawley fever dream against a cadre of Real Regular Americans — it's interesting to note that Ready or Not, another riff on "The Most Dangerous Game" in which the aristocratic hunters eventually become the prey, premiered without incident this week.
Ready of Not takes the best and most crowd pleasing elements of The Most Dangerous Game, Your’re Next, The Purge, and Clue and blends them into a tasty, bloody smoothie.
The latest from Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, two-thirds of the filmmaking group Radio Silence best known for the first-person horror segment of V/H/S , mashes up Clue and The Most Dangerous Game and infuses it with dark, nutty energy, gore (the loopy rather than repulsive kind), smart laughs and sharp satire at the expense of America’s well-to-do.
Oh wait, there's still one left and it's Ready or Not, a bloody hilarious take on The Most Dangerous Game that somehow slipped through the cracks in Disney's acquisition of Fox.
Ready or Not joins the pantheon of people being hunted movies alongside classics like Battle Royale , The Most Dangerous Game , The Running Man (it’s a classic!), and Hard Target .
But Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett keep things lively with a lavish visual style that nods toward Kubrick’s The Shining , Eyes Wide Shut , and even Barry Lyndon , while still maintaining an identity of its own.
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Grace will not go quietly, ripping her wedding dress so she can be more mobile — a nod to Uma Thurman’s angry bride in “Kill Bill” — ditching her heels for a pair of Converse high tops and fighting back.
She sympathetically goes along to get along at first, before her wide-eyed realization of terror, then grows into a bloody bride fighting back like Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill” (2003).
Samara Weaving continues her career of kicking ass while looking unbelievably gorgeous with her lively latest movie Ready or Not , the story of the toughest bride having the worst wedding day since Kill Bill .
For Samara Weaving, who has starred in genre films like “The Babysitter” and prestige titles like “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “Ready or Not” is a revelation in her capacity to become a take no prisoners heroine in the tradition of Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill.”
Several scenes recall monster-in-the-house classics, from Robert Wise’s “The Haunting” (1963) to Steven Spielberg’s raptor kitchen in “Jurassic Park” (1993).
Lit mostly with candles, the sprawling villa in which the film mostly takes place assumes a creepy aura reminiscent of the opulently spooky house in Robert Wise’s The Haunting.
This lurid, comical blend of "Rosemary's Baby," "The Most Dangerous Game" and Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" begins with a flashback that reveals a bit too much of what bride-to-be Grace (Samara Weaving) is about to experience.
But the movie’s combination of horror, dark comedy and social commentary, while a substantial improvement over directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s previous effort, the dreary found-footage “Rosemary’s Baby” clone “Devil’s Due,” is nowhere near as deftly handled as it was in Peele’s film.
While it’s easy to enjoy this gripping, giallo-gruesome exercise as a kind of Gothic genre-movie pastiche — “What We Do in the Shadows” meets “Rosemary’s Baby,” with a generous helping of “Clue” — the subtext is rich enough to fuel reams of feminist- or film-studies essays.
The great Andie MacDowell is a treat as Grace’s morally uncertain new mother-in-law, and Nicky Guadagni is a hoot as the bloodthirsty aunt Helene, who wears a cape like an extra from “Rosemary’s Baby” and wields an ax like an extra from “Braveheart.”
“Ready or Not” is “The Most Dangerous Game” with notes of “Rosemary’s Baby” and the sassy, snarky ’tude of “Heathers.”
The direction by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillet (whose previous feature effort was the slightly less impressive “Rosemary’s Baby” knockoff “Devil’s Due”) due an effective job of mining the material for both laughs and jumps and doing so in a stylishly grubby manner.
Look at Scream as an example as something that blends both well; an entertaining horror film that never sacrificed the scares or tension for a moment of fun.
Los amantes del género hallarán en Boda sangrienta resabios de Scream, y de la saga de El juego del miedo.
It’s almost a marriage of “Scream” (1996) where we get the campy blood, guts, and horror, and “The Cabin in The Woods” (2011) where we get more of the fun and humor.
Like “Shaun of the Dead” or “Scream,” it’s a rare beast: A satire that works both as commentary on a style and an exemplar of the style itself.
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The commentary never gets heavy handed, which puts it a step above mega franchise The Purge .
Ready or Not , as a friend so pointedly put it, is Clue if it took place during The Purge .
Ready of Not takes the best and most crowd pleasing elements of The Most Dangerous Game, Your’re Next, The Purge, and Clue and blends them into a tasty, bloody smoothie.
The Ready or Not script by Guy Busick (Stan Against Evil) and R. Christopher Murphy (Minutes Past Midnight) has shades of everything from The Purge to Clue, Evil Dead, and You're Next (as well as the films that inspired them), yet never comes across as being derivative.
It’s Bridesmaids meets The Purge.
Ready or Not is sort of a cross between the tongue-in-cheek horror of yore (Vincent Price’s House of Wax , or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry ) and today’s political-satire stab-and-slabs ( The Purge franchise, and Tales from the Hood: 2 come to mind) with a touch of slapstick.
For good measure, the night is spiked with a shot of the madcap energy of Clue or Neil Simon’s Murder By Death .
With a cavalcade of character actors you’ll want to spend more time with, Ready or Not takes pieces from Clue , Murder by Death , and a host of ’40s thrillers to tell a story that feels keenly relevant.