Ready or Not (2019)

It’s bad enough getting yourself into a fight to the death.  To do so without realizing it seems a bit cliché.  “Fight this guy,” they said.  “It will be fun.”  Then you find out that neither contestant leaves until the other one is lying flat on their back.

Strictly speaking, Grace isn’t fighting against her new family, but the result is the same.  The movie starts on her wedding day.  She’s madly in love with Alex Le Domas.  What she doesn’t know is that the Le Domas family has a bit of a tradition.  When someone becomes a member of the family, they draw a card.  She and at least one family member have to play that game.  If it’s a game like checkers, it’s no big deal.  They just play checkers and that’s it.

There’s one card that’s a death sentence.  If you’ve seen the coming attractions, you can guess which game Grace shouldn’t draw.  Alex and his brother try to talk Grace out of the wedding on the off chance that she might get Hide and Seek as her game, but they can’t tell her outright.  Grace insists, not knowing what she’s getting herself into.

Long ago, great-grandfather Victor Le Domas made a deal with a mysterious businessman.  He and his family got rich off of whatever business Victor chose.  The catch was that the family was bound by the machine.  It would spit out a card every wedding night.  If that game was Hide and Seek, the new person has to be sacrificed.

The movie seems a bit excessive.  I wonder if it was meant to be that way.  Grace has to be taken alive, yet the Le Domas family is armed with lethal weapons.  In fact, most of the staff is killed accidentally.  It makes you wonder why they don’t use tranquilizer darts, instead.  (That would be too simple.)

There’s also a legend that everyone in the family will die a horrible death if they don’t make the sacrifice.  They admit that only one other family to make The Deal is rumored to have met this fate, so they can’t be certain that it’s true.  But it might be.  But it might not be.  Maybe it’s better to just catch Grace and sacrifice her.  No one wants to be the guy who gets the entire family killed.  No pressure.  Right?

It seems that satire movies are tending towards the bizarre.  This isn‘t the extreme that Sorry to Bother You gave us.  I mean, I get where they’re going with this, to some extent.  But it does seem excessive.  In fact, Alex is the only one that has any sort of reservations about hunting down Grace.  Everyone else accepts it like it’s paying for your utilities.  Sacrificing Grace is just the cost of business.

There are worse ways to spend 95 minutes.  One could easily read into the movie about how the rich have every advantage.  Grace grew up a foster kid and is enthralled with the idea of a stable home.  If you want to ignore the subtext, the movie is enjoyable.  You wouldn’t think you could make a movie out of Hide and Seek, but here it is.

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Cube (1997)

There’s a joke that NASA spent millions of dollars to create a pen that worked in space whereas its Soviet counterpart was content using pencils.  If the story is true, I’m sure there’s more to it than the punch line lets on. However, it does make a point; sometimes, simplicity is best.  Take a movie, for instance.  Get rid of the fancy editing and CGI.  Forget the cast of thousands.  Pare down the sets to just one or two.  What are you left with?  You’re left with a movie like Cube.

It starts out with a man in a room which, coincidentally, happens to be a cube of all things.  He walks through the room only to hear a sound and subsequently find himself sliced to death.  I mention this because it sets the tone of the movie.

Six other people meet up by traveling from room to room.  We have Leaven, a math student; Rennes, who can escape from prisons; Holloway, a medical professional; Quentin, a police officer; Worth, a paper pusher and Kazan, a savant with some sort of cognitive/mental disorder.  They don’t remember being brought to the cube, nor do they know what the cube is.

Each face of the room, whether it be wall, ceiling or floor, has a door in the center.  Each door has a set of three numbers.  The room on the other side may or may not have a trap, so hold on to your boots.  No, really.  They’ll need them to test the room for traps.

The biggest plan is cooperating.  As you might imagine, tension runs high.  The assumption is that the government is behind their imprisonment.  Who else would have the resources?  (No Mr. Tsoukalos; it’s not aliens.  Probably not.)  Either way, there’s still the issue of getting out.  Leaven is able to figure out that prime numbers are key to figuring out which rooms are trapped.  She’s also able to infer the size of the overall structure and which room to be in if they want to get out.

You might not think you could make a feature-length film out of a concept like this, but Vincenzo Natali did.  Not only that, but it spawned two additional movies, as sequel and a prequel.  (Natali wasn’t involved in either one.)  The big problem with the movie is that, in the absence of high-end effects and whatnot, dialogue has to carry the movie.  Having read other reviews, I might be in the minority here in thinking that it does.

The biggest thing you have to get rid of with a movie like this is expectations.  If you’re coming in expecting to find the meaning of life, you’re going to be disappointed.  If you’re looking for something that can showcase six people trapped in a maze they know nothing about, you’ve found a pretty good one.  It’s one that can even capture your attention through to the end.  There is a certain suspense as the characters alternate between helping and bickering.   Imagine you found yourself in that situation.  How do you think you’d react?

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