“You Pulled the One Bad Card”
When Ready or Not came out, I remember hearing lots of good things about it. And I thought that it might be something fun to watch at some point, especially with how much I enjoyed last year’s Scream requel (or is that legacy sequel?). So when I caught it in TV, I decided to give it a chance. I was pretty disappointed by it.
It should be the happiest day of her life for Grace (Samantha Weaving), who is marrying into the Le Domas family. While they are extremely wealthy, she is marrying Alex (Mark O’Brien) because she truly loves him and is excited about starting a family together.
There’s just one catch, a trifle really. After the wedding, each new member of the family has to play a game. They pick a card to determine what the game is, and Grace picks the Hide and Seek card. The one bad card. Picking that card means the family will be hunting her until dawn, and if they find her, they will kill her. Can Grace survive the night?
Honestly, one of the problems with the movie is that it takes us too long to get there. I knew that much of the plot before I sat down to watch it, and we are quite a ways into the movie before Grace finds that out. Yes, the movie is building the tension, and doing a good job of it. There are also some fun laughs as Grace says or does things that she doesn’t realize mean something different to the family.
Once everyone is on the same page, there are some good moments. This is a horror comedy, and it has great moments of both. There are several tense scenes, and a few scenes that are wonderfully funny.
However, it just doesn’t all come together. We are supposed to get some social commentary on the 1% from the movie, but I feel like those comments were cliched, especially since some of the characters were cliches themselves.
Speaking of which, I had a real hard time remembering who all the characters were and their places in the family.
There are some other plot threads introduced in the movie that don’t seem to go anywhere. I found that frustrating. They are referenced a couple of times and then dropped. The same goes for some of the other social commentary they were trying to include. I see what they thought they were doing, but it honestly didn’t translate.
Since I was watching this on TV, the violence and language were toned down from the film’s R rating. I was impressed with some of the substitutes we got for swear words. I laughed at some of them, and I mean that in a good way, not laughing at poor editing.
And none of this is a reflection on the cast, who are all fine.
Then came the climax. I get what they were going for. I’m trying to decide if my reaction to it was the lack of set up or just my different expectations.
Since I was curious about it, I’m glad I watched Ready or Not. I’m even more glad I watched it on TV so I didn’t waste anything other than my time.
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