Send Help
Sam Raimi has been a brand name since he burst (splattered?) onto the scene with the magnificent, micro-budgeted The Evil Dead in 1981. He executed the tried and true Hollywood career strategy, still very much valid today, of strutting your stuff in low-budget horror as an entree to bigger things. Raimi and company strutted their stuff all right. Evil Dead became a franchise, ushering in a second wave of Zombie Core (after Romero), gifted us Bruce Campbell, and Raimi eventually got Marvelled.
Raimi has tried, successfully and not, to stray from the horror genre over the years, but Send Help feels like a concerted effort to return to his roots. While not specifically horror, and with some at least superficial lunges at social commentary (sexist office politics suck), the new one feels like a mechanism to return to the Bloody Sam of the Evil Dead trilogy, with their relentless velocity, and the late-career (and quite good) Drag me to Hell (to which the new one has some superficial resemblance).
Linda Liddle (get it?) is a hardworking, number-crunching strategist at some sort of financial services company or other (does it matter?) expecting a promotion, or at least a modicum of respect, from the newly appointed nepo baby CEO Bradley (Dylan O'Brien). But to no surprise the promotion does not come. She is crestfallen and on the verge of quitting but is appeased by, in one of the many contrivances of the plot, being invited, along with a cadre of bros from the office, for some sort of business meeting in Bangkok (why would the bros want her along?). There is an almost perfunctory plane crash (though there is a fun sight gag involving those pull down airplane window shades), and guess which two are the sole survivors? At this point the film becomes a two-hander with the rather facile "we are not in the office anymore" metaphor front and center, as survival expert Linda gets the upper hand over the spoiled rich boy.
Filled with plot groaners that push suspension of disbelief past its breaking point, the film has a "come on, come on, hurry up, let's bring on the gore" urgency that I found to be borderline insulting. Just to mention one of many examples is when Bradley says they have been on the island for two weeks and he has basically a five o'clock shadow.
We are not talking about a film that intends subtle character development. The introduction to Linda in her apartment has a series of pans across a library of books on survival. Alone, Linda watches the show Survivor while swilling chardonnay and talking with her bird. She has a Survivor audition tape, which the bros somehow get hold of and ridicule. Get it? I am not generally a hard-ass "Plausible" (as Hitchcock once disparagingly referred to plot-hole-obsessed critics), but it was like they weren't even trying.
Raimi is in high velocity mode again here. The movie makes no pretense that it is anything more than a delivery system for gore. And the gore is often squishily great. I found the scene of the hunting and killing of a wild boar, where we first see the reflection of madness in Linda's eyes, to be particularly effective. There is much vomiting. Which, if that is your thing, you are in for a treat!
There is also, it should be noted, a sequence on a mountain ridge that triggered my fear of heights big time. You have been warned.
McAdams deserves particular praise here, going from office geek to avenging angel with remarkable dexterity. She wins the movie (one might say survives it), and is one of the best we have.
There is a fun-at-the-movies vibe here that should be celebrated, to be honest (I am mostly just cranky over how little movies give a damn about plot or character development anymore). On this note, Sony, the distributor, was determined to send this straight to streaming, but begrudgingly relented to a theatrical release. And it has been the #1 movie in the world for two weeks, surpassing its production budget already. No matter my overall misgivings with Send Help, this is a very good thing for movies.
