Ready or Not (2019)

Spoilers, because this movie isn’t worth watching.

You know how sometimes Disney and Dreamworks both make a movie about tangentially the same thing? “Antz” and “Bugs Life,” “Finding Nemo” and “Shark’s Tale,” “Madagascar” and “The Wild,” etc?
Well it appears that happened here.
Someone with a script and a dream went to shop their idea amongst studios to see who would fund their pet project. The succinct plotline they gave must have been summed up with “There’s a very rich family and there will be a murder; one of the people involved is from outside the family. Include the word ‘eccentric’ in the description so audiences will think they’re going to watch a comedy.”
And thus we got Tyler Gillet’s turd to Rian Johnson’s masterpiece.

“Knives Out” (2019) was a magnificently crafted who-dun-it stuffed to the gills with A-list actors, “Ready or Not” (2019) was a plodding, gross-out ‘thriller’ starring whoever they could scrape out of the bottom of the casting barrel.

I will say that this may be the ultimate dark comedy.
Though “ultimate” here doesn’t mean “best,” it means “taken to the farthest logical extreme.”
And even though this movie was unfortunately labeled a “comedy,” it was not funny. It was about as jovial as “Get Out” (2017) and made approximately as much sense.

Grace (Samara Weaver) just married the love of her life, Alex (Mark O’Brien), the heir apparent to a board-game empire, which had apparently been founded generations ago on a bet and a curse.

As narrated, the bet was simply about drawing a lucky card, though it was later revealed that great-grandfather sold his soul, and through some stupidly convoluted means, had to commit blood sacrifices, randomly alternating between goats and humans.
The curse said that if the family didn’t play a game on the night of a wedding, then the family would die.
Obviously.

Fast forward to ‘today’ and it was Grace’s turn to draw the card which would tell them what game they would play; included were family-friendly options like chess and checkers and, I suppose, The Game of Life. For no explained reason, the ‘hide and seek’ card that Grace drew had the unofficial tag-line of ‘get murdered,’ and thus the story was off and I wasted the next 90 minutes of my life watching Grace constantly  escape her truly bonkers in-laws as they shot at her with guns and crossbows.

Alex, clearly not okay with watching his new bride get turned into an offering, spent most of the movie trying to help her get away.
Then he suddenly turned on her at the last minute for no discernible reason, in what I can only assume was supposed to be an ‘expected’ switch, though nothing throughout gave me any reason to suspect he’d turn. It made even less sense than Prince Hans suddenly being evil in “Frozen” (2013).

Consistently throughout the movie, the family talked about the curse and the man who’d cursed the family.
Here’s the problem though: at no point during the build-up did anything supernatural happen, and it was made clear that no one in the family had ever actually seen anything supernatural in their lives before. It wasn’t until the last five minutes that things went magically skiwompus and a demon/soul was shown sitting in a chair.
That’s bad storytelling.
For none of the family to have ever been directly influenced by the curse, yet to follow the rituals to the letter so vehemently, is bad character development. That’s not “we’re harboring a dark family secret” material, that’s well and truly into the “we all drink from lead-lined cups and lick the walls” realm. They treated goofy superstition as undeniable fact in a way that gives Scientology a run for its money.
This could have been easily solved by adding disembodied voices, or inexplicable floating objects, or literally anything to make it clear that they were actually terrified of a deadly curse and not just bat-shit crazy and disturbingly content to murder people.

It would have been quite cathartic to watch Grace actually kill off the family members one-by-one to earn her escape.
Instead, they all exploded in the morning sun, like vampires, which entirely took away any autonomy or empowerment from Grace and just left her sitting in the “world’s unluckiest bride” chair for the entire movie, and her escape was just handed to her.
Please don’t get me wrong: in real-life, you shouldn’t have to “earn” your escape from getting murdered, but for the sake of storytelling, it needed to happen.
As it stands, the movie just developed around Grace and she wasn’t actually relevant at all.

Side note: since the ‘murder’ card was hidden amongst a stack of ‘regular’ cards, and the only time one of those cards got drawn was when a marriage happened, its not a stretch to believe that if this family had lived, you could easily end up with an entire generation of family members who don’t know that ‘hide and seek’ means ‘kill someone,’ which immediately ruins the world-building element behind the curse and bluntly reveals it to be a one-off macguffin.

There was some impressive gross-out body horror, for no other reason than to make that hard-R rating stick.
Much of it made me deeply uncomfortable the way “Happy Tree Friends” did in the mid-2000s.
If you’re not familiar with HTF, do not look it up. I’m serious.

The scenery of the mansion was gorgeous and the music was grand.
That’s it.
I gave those same two compliments to “Knives Out” too, but they were footnotes that time because everything else about it was so good.
Those are the only credits I can give this.

This was not a good movie or a good use of my time.
I did not feel “thrilled” while watching it, there was nothing that could have been interpreted as “horror” in any direction (besides one particularly telegraphed jump-scare), it wasn’t “mysterious” in the slightest, and the only joke I could pin-point throughout the entire thing was Grace’s last line, and it wasn’t even funny.
If anything, I just felt mild-to-moderate annoyance throughout.

I’m glad I didn’t waste my time or money to see this in theaters, but now I’m mad I wasted my time at home, when I could have been doing something more fulfilling, like cleaning my cat’s litterbox.