I recently watched the original RoN with a bunch of people who were seeing it for the first time and had a lot of fun with it. The cult hit from Radio Silence (also responsible for such gems as Ash, the Good Scream Reboots, and Abigail) way back in the early days of #MeToo meandered and twisted around some Dangerous Game tropes and then settled very comfortably into a will-they-won’t-they tease about devil worship which felt a lot like daring M Night Shyamalan not to do a shittier adaptation.
Samara Weaving, who I think at the time I probably described as the budget Margot Robbie, has since then gone on to make weird horror films like the much beloved Babysitter franchise on Netflix, Guns Akimbo, and that good Scream reboot we were talking about earlier. But in the intervening years since her breakout role, I guess there was interest in seeing her play more… hide and seek? The cameos in Here I Come are actually really satisfying and run the gamut from trendy to introducing new breakout stars of their own. The casting seems to correct the lack of diversity of the first film while maintaining the plucky, quippy dialogue, and doubling down on capricious and arbitrary rules which hamstring the villains from wasting Weaving in a single gun shot (the whole plot point of drawing a card to play a game before the wedding is still really squishy as a concept and doesn’t fully explain how so many families end up with successful marriages). Elijah Wood seems very happy to introduce new limitations like a high school improv coach at any point which is convenient for the plot.
I don’t have any specific points against this sequel or the introduction of the plucky but largely shoe-horned younger sister played by Kathryn Newton, though I don’t know how much more gas in the tank there is for a third. At a certain point, the point becomes spraying Weaving with as much blood as you can, and though that doesn’t have limiting returns, some of the other antics do seem to be wilting after ten years.
