Tags: blog, film, action, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday May 23rd, 2026
Stop getting rich people wrong
Move along, nothing to see here. Do you remember the first film? Probably not, it wasn't particularly memorable. Not bad, just perfunctory. This is more of the same, almost literally.
The only reason I bothered with this sequel is because of the inclusion of Kathryn Newton, who I last saw lighting up the screen in Lisa Frankenstein. Here she knowingly smirks her way through the film, like she's telling a series of amazing one-liners that have all been cut in the edit.
The whole film feels like everyone's going through the motions and there's no point to any of it.
But that's not what I want to talk about. Because, annoyingly, this film gets rich people wrong. It's not the only culprit, the majority of films that have rich people as 'the enemy' make the same mistake. The basic problem is that they keep portraying the rich as mad, bad and dangerously psychotic.
But we know that's not who these people are. We've all read excerpts from the Epstein files. We've all seen snippets of their twitter feeds. We've all seen their speeches. And what is clear about the super rich is:
The don't care who knows.
They don't care if people find out they're paedophiles, or nazis, or rapists. They know the press, which they own, won't call them on it and they have more lawyers than god.
They are desperately unhappy.
Happy, contented people don't post obsessively, continuously, on twitter about trans people. Confident people who are comfortable in their own skin don't get endless plastic surgery and post pictures of how 'jacked' they are. Generous, charitable people do not relentlessly endorse far-right conspiracy theories. Name me a single billionaire that looks like they're having the time of their life...
They are tediously boring.
Not just bored, but boring. When was the last time you read or heard anything spouted by a billionaire that made you're heart sing or piqued your curiosity? They are incurious people who are incapable of querying themselves, let alone the world around them.
They're cowards who never take risks and only prey on the weak
They (almost literally) have all the money in the world to enact their rich-fuck fantasies but they are terrified of any actual harm or consequences. They have networks of people who pre-select their victims to be the poor and vulnerable. The ones who can't fight back. And if there is ever any dirty work to be done then they'll just pay people who'll pay people who'll pay other people to do it for them.
All of which makes Ready or Not's world of ultra-wealthy psychopaths incongruous to the actual point they're (half-arsedly) making.
In Ready or Not's world, the global elite are confident and self assured, willing to take risks, get their hands dirty, and seem to love being rich. Some of them even seem to be a bit of a laugh, in a kind of rich idiot kind of way. They're scum, but they're fun scum.
The actual global elite probably quite like this kind of depiction. It makes them look exciting and interesting instead of the kind of dull, Nazi Colin Robinson's that they actually are.
The only film I've seen recently that really nailed this has been Relay. Where the rich bastard behind everything is coaxed out of hiding just the once and all of the actual antagonists are his minions, held at arms length and taking all the risks.
And whilst it's absurd to hold these disparate films to the same standards, I do wish that all films would try to properly skewer these pieces of shit, instead of cartoonishly portraying them in a way that manages to flatter how disgusting they really are.
