Review: SEND HELP

 by Rob DiCristino

Get it together, Sam.

Good morning. Nice to see you. Today, I’d like to talk about entropy and decay. Wait. No. Back up. First, I’d like to talk about greatness: Sam Raimi is a great filmmaker. That’s obvious to everyone, right? Hell, even if he had only invented the modern horror-comedy (Evil Dead II), perfected the crime noir thriller (A Simple Plan), or set the high-water mark for blockbuster superhero spectacle (the Spider-Man trilogy), he would still be recognized as one of the most important voices in twentieth century American cinema, and he did all three of those things! Raimi’s best work is mischievous and kinetic; it’s got both a mean streak and a big, sappy heart. His movies are pulpy and old-fashioned, animated and playful. At the same time, he can transmute those comic book sensibilities into affecting dramas that present moral battles in subtler, more thoughtful ways — movies about guilt, temptation, and consequence. Sam Raimi’s ethos and dexterity remind us that our greatest stories are all rooted in humanity, no matter what genre trappings we might lay upon them.

Which brings us to Send Help, a thriller that feels tailor-made for Raimi’s blend of style and substance. Linda (Rachel McAdams) is a mid-level accounting executive about to be passed over for promotion by yet another one of her douchebro boss’ (Dylan O’Brien as Bradley) college buddies. Linda may be a number-crunching dynamo, says Bradley, but the company needs a special kind of VP. It needs someone who relates to the clients. Someone who golfs with them. Someone who, you know, has a penis. An undeterred Linda vows to prove her worth on an upcoming business trip to Thailand, but her plans are waylaid when a violent storm sends the company plane careening into the ocean. Waking up on a deserted island, Linda — who, wouldn’t you know it, is also an obsessive Survivor fan — finds herself in another fight for her life, a literal one made more difficult when Bradley’s useless ass washes up on the shore nearby. Now, Linda must keep them both alive long enough to be rescued and maybe, just maybe, to make Bradley regret treating her so disrespectfully.

Sounds like a Sam Raimi movie to me! Better yet, it sounds like exactly the kind of smaller-scale genre exercise that might break Raimi out of what’s turned into a decade-long creative funk, a string of big-budget franchise work that, while certainly more competent and functional than most of the IP slop out there, has felt almost entirely anonymous. Like Drag Me to Hell after the Spider-Man films, Send Help should be the palette cleanser, the grimy little slice of analog horror that reminds everyone — including, perhaps, himself — what Sam Raimi is really capable of. And what better partner could he have than Rachel McAdams, a five-tool juggernaut who still isn’t getting the movie star recognition she deserves? Like Raimi, McAdams can work in any genre — her recent resume includes Spotlight, Disobedience, Game Night, Eurovision Song Contest, and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. — and knock the damn cover off the ball every single time. McAdams is game for anything, and Send Help is her and Raimi’s chance to make something truly audacious.

So why did I start this off by jabbering about entropy and decay? Because Send Help is a disheartening misfire, a cheap and gutless waste of the considerable resources I just went to such lengths laying out. Written by Freddy vs. Jason and Friday the 13th (2009) scribes Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, it misses nearly every opportunity to develop ideas beyond their most superficial elements, instead getting so wrapped up in its amateurish twists and turns that it eventually belly flops into a climax that provokes more questions than it could possibly answer. While Raimi does get in a few stray pints of goop and gore here and there — including a boar hunting scene you’ve probably seen in the trailer and a great vomit gag that provoked the only audible reaction from my preview audience — Send Help lacks any trace of his signature humanity, energy or atmosphere. Bill Pope’s cinematography is unbelievably flat, making the poor CGI effects look even worse than they are. Worst of all, it’s not scary! Hell, the Spider-Man 2 surgery scene is scarier than anything you’ll see here.

Thus, despite Rachel McAdams’ best efforts — she goes for it, as expected, giving Linda far more wit and texture than she deserves on the page — Send Help is another frustrating turn from a filmmaker now in full creative decay, an entropic drift toward irrelevance that stems less from lack of talent than it does from laziness. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that Raimi’s voice was stifled by the sheer mass of a project like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, an unwieldy tentpole with little to no room for his subversive flair. A standalone, mid-budget genre piece like Send Help, on the other hand, gives him no such excuse. There’s no excuse for how bland this thing is, how tonally inconsistent and underdeveloped it is. How largely bloodless and unscary it is. How it flat-out plagiarizes a scene from David Slade’s Hard Candy and executes it half as well. How it can’t even head-fake toward a message about female empowerment in the workplace without resorting to caricature. Sam Raimi is a great filmmaker, but he has no excuse for this.

Send Help hits U.S. theaters on Friday, January 30th.