2 out of 5

Directed by: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett

Is it really social commentary if you just say the exact thing you’re commenting on, out loud? I mean, I guess that definitionally is commentary, but is it clever? Is it useful beyond acknowledgment?

Jumping around, let’s acknowledge (or socially commentate on) the movie V/H/S. It was: kinda ungood. You know what was good about it? Directors Radio Silence, aka Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. I somehow missed their debut feature Devil’s Due, but I caught right back up for their next anthology, Southbound. …And then found my interests dwindling, as their entry in that film suggested V/H/S might’ve been more of a flash-in-the-pan versus a promising beginning (acknowledging the team’s origins in web shorts prior to that – suggestive of their Radio Silence debut being the nadir of that approach).

When I read about the premise of Ready Or Not, I wondered if there was more to it. It read like a movie that announced itself from the first sentence; it would otherwise need to survive on its visuals. Which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but my snap judgements of the trailer and movie poster didn’t provide further encouragement along those lines, either – though cast well, the visuals nonetheless looked like a middleground of things we’d seen elsewhere, from the grandiose but grubby design to the muddy color color grading.

So: I gave the movie some time to fade from my memory, and up-front judgements. Present Me is now here to let Past Me know that he was pretty spot on in his judgements, yet again. Way to go, Past Me – keep making your mind up on things with scant evidence!

Ready Or Not kicks off with an age-old way of killing tension: showing us the twist up front. I’m never quite sure why films do this; I think the “right” answer is to create tension / instrigue – OMG what’s happening, and how will the rest of the film connect back to this?? – but efforts from the past bundle of years that effect tend, moreso, to act like second screen indulgences: we suspect you’re not going to pay much attention, so just so you know what the movie is going to be about… here you go. Thus, in practice, if you actually are paying attention to the movie, you’re now twiddling your thumbs for 30 minutes waiting for the obvious to occur.

The twist here is that the Le Domas family – a rich brood who made their dollars as, mm, board game tycoons, and into which the non-rich Grace (Samara Weaving) is marrying – has a ritual for incoming family members: play a game with us, and it might be a game in which you die. We get a clip of this upfront via flashback, as Grace’s eventual hubby-to-be, Alex (Mark O’Brien), is confronted with this violence as a child, protected by his brother, Daniel (Adam Brody); the film then flashes forward to Alex and Grace’s wedding day at the Le Domas mansion, and plenty of boy-the-rich-are-assholes potshots, leading up – that half hour later – to Grave being told about the game playing requirement. Which seems all innocent and silly, if a little weird, until the “hide and seek” card she draws causes everyone to go silent and start bringing out the weapons. Cue an hour of cat and mouse around the mansion.

Weaving is fantastic. Her balance of terror and anger is believable; I appreciate that writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy don’t turn her into an instant badass hero or necessarily bloodthirsty – her progress through this ordeal is balanced. Brody and O’Brien do their parts as unwilling participants in the “game,” but patriarch and matriarch Henry Czerny and Andie MacDowell feel like they’re waiting around for meatier roles, and Melanie Scrofano is wasted as comedic relief. Essentially, besides Weaving, all of the actors seem lost in trying to figure the film’s tone as outright farce, or mean-spirited horror, or something more tense, and they’re lost because the filmmakers don’t seem to know it either.

One part of Ready Or Not is high gloss Michael Bay-like horror, and yeah, sorry Bloody Disgusting graduates, but you heard me right: from Brian Tyler’s overtuned score, to the “friendly” violence, to Terel Gibson unfussy editing, to the eye-rollingly surface level concepting, this is easily digestible glitz. Meanwhile, another part of the film is aiming for that new breed of elevated horror, married to Tarantino-esque grindhouse; this is responsible for some out of place glory shots, and attempts to ground the scuffles and gore, but also some last-minute overkill.

That overkill, by the way, is what eventually sinks the movie for me: while I’m mostly ragging on it, RoN is entertaining. It’s predictable, but makes effective use of its budget for pretty sets, and the surface-levelness nonetheless allows for some good and good horror gags. But just when the movie makes a potentially bold turn, Radio Silence and team chicken out and go for gibs instead. Why? Because it’s a good laugh, but it’s also one of the lazier ways to wrap this up.

Wrapping back around to the start, I suppose no one was asking us to take Ready or Not as a commentary on class culture, but it’s an evergreen topic and was made especially hard to avoid due to its time of release. Plus, the film goes in for many “rich people sure are weird!” snipes along the way, so it’s fairly embedded. Between that obviousness, and any plot summary giving away the gist, not to mention the opening scene doing the same, you’d hope the film content could just go for broke and be an over-the-top event. Instead, Radio Silence partially made a “real” film out of a shaky script, then doubted themselves and tried to sprinkle it with grindhouse elements in order to keep their horror bona fides. None of this much succeeds: we unsurprisingly wind up with a milquetoast final product.