Send Help

Have you ever been driving somewhere and your check-engine light comes on? You're suddenly hit with a wave of panic. Will you get to your destination? Is it something innocuous, like you forgot the gas cap back at the filling station? Or are you seeing a harbinger of thousands of dollars in repair? I had the cinematic version of this in the first two acts of Send Help. Rachel McAdams plays Linda, a hard-working office drone who is visibly disheveled and socially awkward. She gets passed over for a promotion when the CEO dies and the new boss, the son of the old one (played by Dylan O'Brien), passes her over in favor of his college buddy. But plans go awry when, on a business flight to Thailand, the plane crashes in the ocean and Linda and Bradley are the only ones who survive, stuck on a remote island. Her fascination with the show Survivor allows her to naturally thrive in the environment, while Bradley, a silver-spooned, trust-fund-supported spoiled brat, is helpless. This flipping of the power dynamic and gender roles -- putting an alpha-male jag-off at the mercy of the woman he overlooked as timid, weak, and unworthy of his consideration -- is the bedrock on which Send Help is built. Bradley takes it for granted that what she does is easy, and hates relying on her, but is forced to suck it up when he sees for himself how hard it is. McAdams and O'Brien are fantastic. The way Linda changes from not understanding office politics and social graces to not only thriving but enjoying herself on the island, while Bradley collapses when taken out of the safety of his environment, his narcissism and ego struggling against his new, uncomfortable, unthinkable reality. And I wanted to love this movie. I was ready ... but that check-engine light kept coming on. The themes of gender roles, power, and trust had been laid out, but not really expanded upon. The movie couldn't seem to figure out how to blend its many genres into a cohesive whole -- sometimes, it's a gritty, two-person Cast Away remake, sometimes it's comedic, and sometimes there's a sinister edge, but they never work together. All the elements of the movie work against one another, switching tones without notice. Little hints of things pop up, teases of twists or secrets to be revealed, and I'd think surely the movie isn't dumb enough to spoil itself. It'd be like the kid in The Sixth Sense telling Bruce Willis "you notice nobody ever responds to you?". I saw the warning signs, but didn't want to believe them. I'm not a big fan of Sam Raimi -- in fact, I think he has coasted on the Evil Dead movies for 40 years -- but I didn't think he'd be this lazy. I didn't think the script could be this obvious. And then the third act kicks in. It is appropriate the pivotal moment that ushers in the third act involves someone plummeting off a cliff, because that's exactly what this movie does. Without spoiling it, someone does something truly evil (something Send Help has been hinting at with all the subtlety of a municipal fireworks show) and ruins the dynamic before launching into the climactic showdown. There is nobody to cheer for in the movie's closing stretch. There is no catharsis. There is no growth. There is only a protracted, and preposterous, fight sequence that defies physiology and pushes the patience of the audience to the breaking point. Any of the themes the movie has been trying and failing to build on get washed away entirely. I was prepared to give this 4 stars, and then the last act happened, and, well, look at the score now. I said before Raimi has coasted on reputation, and this movie, his first since the abysmally dull Dr. Strange sequel, doesn't buck that trend. Not that the muddled and hackneyed script he's given is much to work with, but Raimi hasn't tried for years. He hasn't needed to. He's had an inexplicably bottomless well of geek cred. He has his visual language and he sticks to it, whether it fits the movie or not, and it does not here, but dammit he's gonna do it anyway. The direction is passionless and rote, evoking the feeling of a gun-for-hire job. Raimi's direction in the Evil Dead movies was scrappy, energetic, full of a personally-driven need to put his imprint on the cinematic world. Send Help is the opposite; it is the work of a man propping up a brand. Add in some egregious CGI that looks as bad as the Scorpion King in the mummy sequel 25 years ago, a score that is labeled to have been provided by Danny Elfman but shows absolutely none of Elfman's charm, and a clunky, poorly-formed script written by the guys who wrote both Freddy vs. Jason (which has aged like a corpse in the sun) and the Friday The 13th reboot (a script so prurient and nonsensical, you'd swear it was an AI hallucination from the prompt of a 14 year old boy), and you've got a recipe for a movie that was destined to fall apart before it was ever put together. Once again, another scene in the movie provides a fantastic commentary on itself; at the very end, one character says they're going to write self-help book, and it's going to be about how "no help is coming, you have to do it on your own". This movie needed help. No help came. And it failed to do it on its own.