READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME
(15) 108mins
★★★★☆
THIS funny and ferociously bloody sequel to the excellent 2019 horror – which boomed at the box office – starts where the last film ended.
Her wedding dress having been dyed red with the insides of others, Grace (Samara Weaving) lights a cigarette as her newly dead husband’s estate burns around her.
Within one deep drag, she passes out and is carted off to hospital.
Grace has just survived a devilish game of hide-and-seek on her wedding night, which saw her nearly murdered several times by her in-laws.
So she blew them up.
This has left a hole in the ranks of satanic followers around the world, meaning they must all join forces to decide who will take over.
And there’s only one way of doing that: another very deadly game.
This play must include Grace and also her sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who is only there as she’s her emergency contact.
The pair are forced to play against an eclectic mix of messed-up families who have already sold their souls to the devil.
They have been gathered together by a sociopathic lawyer (Elijah Wood).
The group include psychotic twins Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy) and their billionaire father Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg), who host the event in their huge hotel complex.
All a bit The Shining.
The storyline might be a version of the first film, but the hilarious horror really works.
At some points you’re laughing nervously, at others you’re shocked by the brutality.
Both Gellar and Wood know what they’re doing and bring an extra twinkle to their crazed characters, but it is Weaving who gives energy to her killings.
She has an amazing ability to look beautiful and broken at the same time — and has fight sequences down to a fine art.
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett know they’re on to a good thing with this devilishly good game of a film.
While the idea isn’t much different from the first, they have still made something remarkably enjoyable and exciting.
They don’t get too bogged down in the nitty-gritty of the game’s details, which keeps it moving at a decent pace.
And the exploding bodies and Satan slayers never get old.
It’s bloody good.
FILM NEWS
- A QUIET Place 3 will see Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy return in the horror franchise.
- JACK RYAN: Ghost War is a movie sequel to Prime Video’s series starring John Krasinski.
- A REMAKE of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport is in the works.
PROJECT HAIL MARY
(12A) 157mins
★★★★☆
AS Ken to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, Ryan Gosling proved he had decent comedy chops.
And here he flexes his funny bones again, spending the majority of Project Hail Mary’s two and a half hours of screen time on a spaceship acting alongside only an alien (puppet) called Rocky.
Not only is Gosling’s performance a triumph, he makes the science-heavy script engaging and amusing.
Based on the best-selling novel by Andy Weir about a disease carried by stars that could destroy humanity, this is a sci-fi yarn with some serious astrophysics and a powerful message under- pinning it.
But at heart it’s a sweet buddy movie, E.T-style, about the friendship between Dr Ryland Grace (Gosling), who awakes from a coma light years away from Earth, and Rocky (controlled and voiced by James Ortiz), the creature who enables him to find courage.
Flashbacks to time on Earth reveal how meeting Government agent Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller) landed him in the cosmos, and there are blockbuster-worthy visual effects.
It’s heartwarming without becoming mawkish.
MIDWINTER BREAK
(12A) 91mins
★★★☆☆
TYPICAL of married couples who have been together for decades, Stella (Lesley Manville) and Gerry (Ciaran Hinds) know each other inside out.
Their only child has grown up and moved away.
Now both retired, they live a life of comfortable and affectionate domestic routine in Edinburgh.
It’s a city they’ve called home since leaving Belfast, where both were raised, at the height of the Troubles.
Stella can finish her husband’s sentences and predict his reactions, yet despite all their years together, sometimes she wonders if he really knows her at all.
Eating sandwiches alone on Christmas Eve while Gerry sleeps in his chair after one whisky too many galvanises her to book a trip to Amsterdam.
But shared days together in the Dutch city stir up difficult memories. Stella finds herself asking: Is this it? And if so, is it enough?
Based on a 2017 novel by Bernard MacLaverty, the pace is slow.
But Manville’s Stella is a masterclass in gentle understatement as flashbacks lead us to understand more about her increasingly devout Catholic faith.
