Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is an overacheiving corporate worker who has been promised a VP position at her company. Unfortunately the new boss, an insufferable youngster named Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien), won't give her what she's due. However, the tables are turned during an overseas work trip, when the two are stranded on an uninhabited tropical island together, after their flight crashes.
It's been far too long since we had an original Sam Raimi film, and this one is a lot of fun. It's got action, comedy, bloody gore, and pig snot being flung on the camera lens. I love that it gives Rachel McAdams a really juicy leading role. Linda Liddle is great at her job, but she's got terrible people skills and some hygiene issues that signal that she's not very self-aware, and probably deluded about her career prospects. McAdams isn't afraid to get gross or come off as a weirdo. She's stellar at juggling the movie's variety of different tones, from straight drama to wildly over-the-top genre nastiness. Dylan O'Brien is also very good at being obnoxious and awful, but also just charismatic enough that he's not entirely unsympathetic. And that's important, given where the movie goes.
You could classify "Send Help" as part of the recent spate of media about the class-divide, similar to "Triangle of Sadness" and "The White Lotus." Linda turns out to be a "Survivor" enthusiast who thrives in the wild, while Bradley is useless. However, Raimi has little interest in social satire, and puts all his efforts into thrills and mayhem. Linda and Bradley might represent the forces of the privileged and the exploited, but it's their decisions as individuals that make the movie so compelling to watch. It's not clear cut who you're supposed to be rooting for, all the way up to the end, and the movie gleefully keeps subverting common genre conventions and keeps the audience guessing. What kind of movie are we even watching? Is this a revenge thriller? Is this a "Misery" style psycho caretaker scenario? Is this some kind of twisted romance? Maybe a little of everything?
One thing that I've noticed about modern comedies is that there aren't many of them that have a good grasp of comedic film language anymore. Sam Raimi has always been fantastic at it. There's a montage sequence involving Bradley getting dehydrated that's just a long string of dissolves of Dylan O'Brien head shots, floating over the screen one after the other. It stood out because it had been so long since I'd seen any other action comedy attempt something similar - with the exception of last year's "Naked Gun" reboot. I hope to see more comedies that follow suit. Raimi also manages the shifting tone extremely well. Here, he balances cartoonish gags and heightened imagery with pretty grounded characters. Sure, they're broadly drawn and are prone to unhinged behavior, but they exist in a pretty believable emotional reality for most of the film, so you get more invested in their clashes.
My only major criticism of "Send Help" is of the ending, which I found too abrupt. I liked the ultimate outcome, just not how we got there. Maybe I was looking for more closure and maybe I was hoping for more carnage, but it feels like Raimi could have gotten more out of the material. Then again, "Send Help" already runs 113 minutes, and hits every element you want out of a Raimi film, so it feels greedy to want more. I hope the film's success means that we can get Rachel McAdams in more starring roles, and that it won't be over a decade before they let Sam Raimi make something similar again. There hasn't been nearly enough screen splatter in circulation lately.
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