A lethal family game night of hide and seek with crossbow
The answer to “Ready or Not” is “not.”
This stridently jaunty new thriller squanders a premise laid out simply in its trailers and TV spots: Grace, played by Samara Weaving in a quick-witted, nearly movie-saving turn, marries into a family of rotters whose fortune was built on board games. Wedding night in the family mansion, decked out with dumbwaiters, servants’ corridors and the smell of moral rot, turns into a lethal all-night round of hide and seek, played with executioner’s ax, crossbow, shotgun and hot tea kettle.
Earlier this month, you may recall, a movie called “The Hunt” was shelved prior to its September release, ostensibly on the grounds of gun violence and political inflammations depicted uncomfortably close to our most recent mass shootings.
That film provoked a wide range of knowledgefree speculation from the media, much of it framing the storyline (as Fox News did in a headline) as one that “glamorizes the killing of Trump supporters.” Americans hunting Americans for sport: It’s what’s for dinner, according to every other movie out there along with “The Hunt.”
“Ready or Not” runs along a parallel track, though its pace is oddly arrhythmic and the tone is every which way but assured. Screenwriters Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett take their sweet time setting up a two-sentence setup, and then periodically grind the bloody game to a halt while Grace and husband Alex (Mark O’Brien) sort out their trust issues.
Too often, after a moment of comic desperation or the latest carnage, the writers end a scene with a character spitting out an f-word designed to … well, to end the scene, bluntly. The conceit of “Ready of Not” ties into a family curse that only a certain “ritual” we keep hearing about can prevent. Nothing new there, once the movie gets there.
I did like a few things en route. The casting of Nicky Guadagni as severely disapproving Aunt Helene is choice. (She refers to one relative not by name but by “brown-haired niece.”) Andie MacDowell cuts a striking presence as Grace’s mother-in-law and frenemy. And Weaving excels in the both the antic and ferocious extremes.
Too many of Weaving’s cohorts, however, tend toward mugging or blandness. “Ready or Not” may escalate the gore factor for an outlandish finale that takes things in a new direction. But it’s a new direction that feels entirely predictable. Call it the entirely expected unfamiliar direction. Some early, admiring reviews admired the sociopolitical satire in “Ready or Not,” to which I can only say: It’s a free country, and a funny old world. The movie has one arrow in its crossbow: The rich are awful. And sometimes, when you meet the Fockers, the Fockers turn out to be fockers, all right.