Ready Or Not 2 a dulled splatter sequel, bland bio-docu Nobu is hard to swallow

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come (M18)

108 minutes, opens on March 26
★★☆☆☆

The story: There is still no honeymoon for Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) after averting ritual sacrifice on her hellish wedding day. Her in-laws’ destruction at the end of Ready Or Not (2019) has created a vacancy in a satanic council, whose four remaining member clans are now hunting her in a contest for the High Chair that controls the world.

Radio Silence, the American film-making collective of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and returning star Weaving pick up immediately from their surprise splatter comedy hit, with luckless bride Grace chased around a sprawling estate in Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come.

Also captured is her estranged kid sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), and Grace has only her toughness and smarts to keep them both alive.

There was once such schadenfreude in watching this working-class girl turn the tables on the evil oligarchs.

Weaving is a full-volume Scream Queen. But the anti-capitalist satire is exhausted in a sequel that is a dulled repeat with just double the carnage and multiple enemies from an expanded mythology.

Canadian horror master David Cronenberg in a too-brief cameo is the billionaire paterfamilias who convenes the hunting party.

Sarah Michelle Gellar – of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997 to 2003) fame – and Shawn Hatosy play his psychopathic twin children in contention, the stunt casting more interesting than any of the characters themselves.

That includes Elijah Wood as Satan’s attorney. His function is to explain the rule of their game, which is: If the heroine survives until sunrise, they will all spontaneously explode.

Little else pops except for two humorous kills involving an industrial washing machine and the 1983 Bonnie Tyler power ballad Total Eclipse Of The Heart.

Hot take: A B-movie romp that was devilish fun loses its novelty the second time around.

Nobu (NC16)

110 minutes, opens on March 26
★★☆☆☆

The story: How did a humble sushi apprentice become a luxury hospitality empire bearing his name? Nobuyuki Matsuhisa shares his life’s journey from his boyhood in Japan to his stint in Peru and, eventually, his success in North America after opening his 38-seat Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills which attracted a fan and business partner in Hollywood star Robert De Niro.

Matsuhisa is now 77. He was 28 when he lost his first restaurant in Anchorage, Alaska, along with his entire fortune, in a fire.

The suicide of his best friend is another tragedy he openly shares.

Even so, and despite archival footage supplementing interviews with family members, Nobu Hospitality co-founder De Niro and their stakeholders, the biographical documentary Nobu is bland and superficial.

American director Matt Tyrnauer (Valentino: The Last Emperor, 2009) adapted from Matsuhisa’s memoir of the same title. It is baffling whom he made it for and why, other than to flatter his subject.

Culinary superstar Wolfgang Puck of Spago likens his peer to genius artist Picasso for revolutionising Japanese cuisine with influences from his extensive travels – famously, the Peruvian flavours in his yellowtail jalapeno. Matsuhisa chortles, delighted.

Supermodel Cindy Crawford rhapsodises over his bespoke Cindy Rice creation, a seafood tempura mound any non-fashionista would know to be tendon.

There is adulation worldwide. The camera tracks him private-jetting around his 70 restaurants and hotels in New York, London, Tokyo, Dubai and beyond.

He inspects the kitchens, motivating his army of chefs with talk of perfection and precision as they prepare the dishes in glossy close-ups, although Nobu Inc, it would appear, has come to represent everything the purity of sushi is not.

Hot take: This fawning corporate branding exercise is hard to swallow.