The bride comes with a vengeance in the viciously funny Ready or Not

Samara Weaving in Ready or Not. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

Cruelty is the joke that makes Ready or Not's nasty heart beat. The film's purpose is to inflict as much pain as possible via grotesque slapstick while layering the endeavor with an ample amount of gallows humor. Ready or Not is just clever enough to pull off a pretty basic story while ramping up the insanity more and more until a gloriously bloody conclusion.

Ready or Not stars Samara Weaving Grace, a newlywed adjusting to the immense wealth she has married into. Her husband Alex Le Domas' (Mark O'Brien) family – father Tony (Henry Czerny), drunken brother Daniel (Adam Brody), sister Emilie (Melanie Scrofano), mother Becky (Andie MacDowell), and Aunt Helene (Nicky Guadagni) – has an odd tradition in which the newest member has to play a random game on their wedding night. Grace draws Hide and Seek, which ends up being a rather dangerous game. As Grace navigates through an unfamiliar mansion hiding, her new family members clumsily hunt her down to save their own lives from a potential family curse.

Ready or Not is a vicious movie, devilish in a delightfully entertaining fashion. It's cringe-worthy and gross, lingering on shots to build the anticipation that something wicked is about to happen. The filmmakers like to turn the screw tighter and tighter, setting up little things broadly yet leaving just enough doubt for the audience to pretend there is no way the movie would possibly go that far. But Ready or Not does, and then it goes just a little further because restraint is for the unimaginative. The target, with one notable exception, is the Le Domas family and its associates, who are designed as caricatures of the unfathomably wealthy and privileged. If the film is cruel, it's cruel mostly to the idea of a level of wealth that effectively saps the humanity out of its hosts.

But then there's Grace, who is put through all hell sorts of hell. She's physically battered by a collection of idiots and emotionally wrecked by rejection of the only thing she's ever wanted in life. Ready or Not paints her suffering as a purification from naivete and dehumanization of the soul; the sweetness she exhibits in the beginning is replaced with rage and vindictiveness. Weaving, who is pretty brilliant in this movie, shows this change through a little snort toward the beginning and toward the end of the film – what starts as innocent turns cruel as the night continues and her vengeance roars out. Her survival is rooted in hatred, which is an odd thing to root for in a character. Kindness is an odd weakness for a movie to exploit, perhaps a little too cruel for a movie in which the hate is otherwise directed at rich ghouls.

This is also a bit of a downside to the script. Ready or Not has a difficult time knowing when to show and when to tell, sometimes being a little too blunt with the message or opening with a moment that kills the twist prematurely. The logic for opening 30 years prior is sound: The additional history establishes character motivations for Daniel, Helene, and Alex to a degree while tossing in a nifty '80s joke. The surprise though is a little more valuable than the character points, which are set up rather well in other parts of the film, and the joke is not good enough trade for suspense. Ready or Not would be more interesting had it kept the audience on the same page as Grace in lieu of the quick prologue.

 

That is a pretty minor nit to pick for a movie as funny and ridiculous as Ready or Not. Aside from a lack of narrative subtlety, the script itself has a bounty of clever jokes and macabre sight and sound gags that run right through a marvelously bloody end. Directors Mark Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett keep a pretty excellent tempo and maintain a near perfect blend of comedy to suspense, using the inherent silliness of the premise to create some chills. The movie is about the lengths people will go to survive, and whether or not those lengths are worth surviving for, which is unnerving to say the least. The film's tone is humorous, but the content is mildly terrifying because of how easy it is to be heartless and cruel if one's survival is on the line.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 95 minutes

Genre: Thriller

tl;dr

What Worked: Samara Weaving, Sense Of Humor, Tone

What Fell Short: A Little Too Much Exposition

What To Watch As Well: House of the Devil, You're Next

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has fun with its frights

Michael Garza and Zoe Margaret Colletti in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Nostalgia is the heartbeat of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. From the retro 1960s setting to the familiarity of the folklore, Scary Stories is soaked in memories, of childhoods spent reading under blankets with a flashlight in one hand and a collection of macabre tales in the other. Scary Stories gets a lot of mileage from that nostalgia, which elevates the film in its more entertaining moments but hurts it when it strays too far from fond memories.

Based on the eponymous book series by Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories centers on life in a small Pennsylvania town right around Halloween circa1968. Friends Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and Chuck (Austin Zajur) meet Ramón (Michael Garza) on Halloween night as they evade the wraith of local sociopath Tommy (Austin Abrams). To complete their Halloween adventure, they go to the abandoned mansion of Sarah Bellows, the focus of an urban legend for her storytelling prowess and accusations of poisoning local children a generation prior. Stella leaves the mansion with Sarah’s book of scary stories, which soon start becoming all too real nightmares. Stella, her friends, and Chuck’s sister Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn) must figure out how they are becoming characters in Sarah’s book before they vanish from existence.

The Scary Stories book series is beloved by millennials, serving as an introduction to horror for many children. The series is an equally valuable resource for understanding how these stories came to be, with Schwartz outlining each story’s origins and how interpretations change across regions. But the stories themselves are hit or miss: For every terrorizing short like Harold and The Wendigo there is a silly interlude like The Viper or The Hearse Song. The film focuses on the more terrifying tales, driving home some of the fears inherent to the legends. Director André Øvredal does a splendid job of developing a chilling, eerie, and bizarre atmosphere for his retelling, ratcheting up the tension by disorienting the characters and the audience. One of the driving themes of the movie is the fatalism of life, how people react once they know their time is running out. Øvredal often frames his stories to match this feeling of doom, tightening the character’s environments until only the inevitable can occur.

And, honestly, the books are less memorable for the stories – Schwartz’s storytelling is more entertaining than discomfiting – than Stephen Gammell’s illustrations, which often made the stories seem far more terrifying than they were. Scary Stories uses his art as inspiration for its character design, and while the film doesn’t meet the level of fear conjured by Gammell’s work – his style is too simple and brutal to nail in film – it adds a bizarre feeling to the movie. There’s an appreciated contrast between the reality of the film and the surreal nature of the art, particularly with the characters in Harold and The Dream. They are in essence still fantasies pulled into reality, never quite fitting into their surroundings and thus standing out for their peculiarity.

Where things get a little troublesome and where the film’s overarching shortcomings shift into focus is the third act. Scary Stories has difficulty finding an appropriate ending to the supernatural frights, shifting instead to a generic pursuit with a lackluster resolution. The movie dedicates so much of its efforts to setting an eerie environment while emphasizing efficient storytelling that ending on an exposition-laden chase is tonally incorrect. The resolution to the ghost problem is similarly off, failing to find a balance between invoking terror and finding sympathy for the villain. Explaining why the ghost is angry is more interesting as a concept than the results shown in the movie, especially with an explanation as forced as rage. There’s also an unnecessarily epic ghost scream because the filmmakers thought it appropriate to have the ghost not go quietly into that good afterlife. The movie generally falls short when it strays too far away from the stories and into generic horror filmmaking, which hits the final act and spoils some of the good vibes.

Where the books and the movie align though is an emphasis on the enjoyment of being scared. Scary Stories in all its forms is accessible horror, a strange introduction into the world of fear and chills. Diehard horror film fans won’t get a ton of frights from this movie, but for less versed viewers this will jolt and disturb with great efficiency. The movie is fun, and there’s always room for one more bit of fun in horror.

  

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 111 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Atmosphere, Character Design, Folklore

What Fell Short: Third Act, Dialog, Character Motivation

What To Read/Watch As Well: The original book series, Trick ’r Treat, A Nightmare on Elm Street

Stars' charisma carries Hobbs & Shaw

Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham in Hobbs & Shaw. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The beauty of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw lies in the simplicity of its existence. This film’s reason for being resides solely in watching two of the biggest action stars in the world action their way through a series of explosions, because watching megastars banter and bicker is an American pastime. This is a pretty old recipe for success, defined around three decades ago but rarely repeated well in the ensuing decades. At the least, Hobbs & Shaw proves the recipe can still produce a fun, albeit very silly, movie.

Hobbs & Shaw stars Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham as Hobbs and Shaw, who are brought together to find a virus currently in the possession of Shaw’s long-lost sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby). Hot on their trail is the committed Brixton (Idris Elba), a borderline cyborg who is part of an international cult dedicated to wiping out the weakest parts of the human race. Hobbs and Shaw must put away the differences carried over from two Fast and Furious movies to stop Brixton and once again save the world from nefarious forces.

Objectively speaking Hobbs & Shaw is not a particularly good film. The dialogue is dopey and hammy, existing as either lazy exposition or juvenile insults directed largely at levels of virility. The run time is overly long, filled to the brim and beyond with extraneous scenes and jokes that go far longer than they should. The story is bonkers and nonsense in the way that movies about technology with no understanding of how technology works are. It’s clear from the get-go this movie is a marketing ploy, especially in those awkward shots that highlight brand sponsors like McLaren. Hobbs & Shaw is fortunate to be a mediocre piece of filmmaking, just good enough to avoid the dustbin.

But, honestly, few if any of those problems matters for Hobbs & Shaw. A lot of the fun from this movie is a result of how gloriously dumb it is. All of the plot holes, silly dialogue, and the abundance of hyper-masculinity that stays just on the right side of toxic because of Hattie’s overarching competence are more selling points than flaws. Providing a proper critique for this movie is nearly impossible, because all of the things it does wrong are utterly immaterial to its sole purpose of watching Johnson and Statham bicker and punch their way around the world. And, well, there are far worse things to spend money on than watching the most charismatic action hero alive argue with a smooth talking Brit with a list of insults 40 meters long. Hobbs & Shaw sell Johnson and Statham, and the movie delivers exactly that with the added bonus of Elba as the villain and Kirby as a more than competent female protagonist.

Hobbs & Shaw is still a lot in both run time and action, often coming close to exhaustion because the loose plot while lacking the verve and energy of the best Furious films. Yet the insanity of it all carries it through, and director David Leitch escalates the explosions throughout to minimize the monotony. He uses as many excuses as possible to blow something up, because explosions are fun and interesting and allow Hobbs and Shaw repeated excuses to demolish the laws of physics. Leitch is also a capable action director, playing around with the fight sequences with Johnson and Statham are brutal and the booms are much larger than necessary.

Despite the super-modern tech, Hobbs & Shaw is a throwback to ’80s flicks like Lethal Weapon and Tango & Cash, buddy comedies where the action and the stars are more important than plot or logic. The film is an ode to a lost genre, a reminder that bankable stars can sell ridiculous stories based on star power alone. It’s a level of sincerity that’s missing with action movies, which often center so much on winks to the audience about the silliness of the expenditure the implausibility becomes a crutch instead of an asset. For movies like Hobbs & Shaw, the madness of impossibility is the attraction; the beauty and brilliance lies in the spectacle of Johnson and Statham driving through an exploding nuclear plant because it’s there to be exploded. Hobbs & Shaw isn’t art at its finest or most divine, but it’s still worth admiring for its bravado.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 135 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby

What Fell Short: Plot, Dialogue, Logic

What To Watch As Well: Fast Five, Furious Seven