Ready or Not was a gleefully silly and over-the-top horror film, released in 2019 and building quite an enthused fan base. At the time it seemed a fairly self-contained experience, so it is a little surprising to see a sequel emerge a full seven years later reuniting key cast and creative crew and picking the story up literally from the moment that the first film ended.

Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) has survived the prolonged attempt on her life by the devil-worshipping Le Domas family. Now she, and her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), are kidnapped by four rival houses to play a second deadly game of hide and seek with control of the entire world at stake.

The eternal struggle of the sequel is how to provide the audience with more of what they liked in the previous film while finding room to deliver new angles, takes, or content at the same time. In the case of Here I Come there is a definitely lean towards offering more of the same. To a large degree this can be satisfying, but precisely how satisfying is down to how much the individual viewer will laugh at people exploding and garishly showering their opponents in blood. There is good material to be played here, and directors Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin get a solid amount of mileage out of it, but it is ultimately derivative of its predecessor. It was never going to make as strong an impact on its audience.

The film takes a leaf from Lionsgate’s popular John Wick franchise in expanding a self-contained film through the use of global secret societies and the like. It achieves much the same result: it allows the sequel to exist for sure, but the concepts do lose a degree of purity. Everything seems less tidy now, and the original film not as special any more.

There are tonal problems. Midway through the film the action contrasts between two simultaneous fight scenes: one a deliberately raucous comedy of errors to a pop soundtrack, the other a shocking and blunt one-sided act of gendered violence. The former is potentially the funniest part of both Ready or Not films put together. The latter, while having a place in cinema when used responsibly, is out of synch with the comic tone of the film it is in and leaves an ugly aftertaste.

As with the original, a lot of the comedic strength comes from the performances. Samara Weaving is back, playing Grace with a familiar and contrasting air of desperation and exhausted boredom. Kathryn Newton proves a solid comedy foil to better bring scenes of running and hiding to life. Among the monied hunters there are a range of smart, knowing performances, with particularly strong work by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Maia Jae, and Elijah Wood.

It’s pretty good, just not as good. If you enjoyed the first film, you will likely enjoy this – but maybe not quite as much. A key fist-fight in a wedding reception centre is almost worth the cost of admission alone. Almost.