THB #796: Send Help
This is a movie that kind of doesn’t want to be reviewed as such… because I don’t want to take away a single moment of the pleasure of discovery that Send Help offers.
It may not be your speed. That’s okay. It’s a thriller. It has moments of violence that are not really extreme, but are, shall we say, explosive. If a bloody mess now and again makes you want to leave the movie theater, don’t go to the movie theater.
There are 2 central beating hearts to Send Help. Three really… four really… the writers are Damian Shannon & Mark Swift. Their ideas. Their set pieces, on the page. It would be dumb to not give them a full share of credit. It couldn’t have happened without them. Likewise, it would be dumb not to embrace Dylan O’Brien, who is one hand of a two-hander and does all that he needs to do and does it well.
But back to the 2 heartbeats. One is director Sam Raimi. He started in way over-the -top horror/thrillers. The Evil Dead has a cult following that is still following. Darkman made him a studio director. A Simple Plan is a well-loved straight drama based around a crime that drew Oscar nominations for its screenplay and for Billy Bob Thornton. Then, Spider-Man made him a boldfaced name.
After 6 years of being The Spider-Man Guy, he returned to his roots and delivered the epic horror thriller, as co-writer and director, Drag Me To Hell. It did $90m worldwide on a $30m budget, but was still seen as a yawn in the industry. (I love the movie and think Alison Lohman does some of her best work in it, tortured by Raimi in every way imaginable.) So back to a massive project went Sam… and Oz The Great & Powerful landed… not as a box office failure… but as a movie so universally disliked that it seemed to put Raimi into Director’s Jail for the first time in his career. Nine years later, he was a late replacement for Scott Derrickson on Dr. Strange 2 with mixed negative results. There were some lovely Raimi touches… but way to much Marvel fan service.
Almost 4 years later, Sam Raimi returns with a film, Send Help, that is not as wild as early Raimi and not as studio as later Raimi, but a surprisingly excellent middle ground. The movie never looks underfed. Bill Pope from the top shelf of cinematographers, Raimi’s longtime editor Bob Murawski, Danny Elfman, Baz Luhrman’s production design team and more assured that.
In some ways, Send Help connects back to Drag Me From Hell, in that it is led by an underappreciated woman who will go through a terrible journey to try to find her inner truth. But this time, the story is much simpler and not supernatural. The official logline:
“An employee and her insufferable boss become stranded on a deserted island, the only survivors of a plane crash. Here, they must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, will they make it out alive?“
Uh… not so much. The marketing makes it clear that working together is… uh… rocky. Here is the audience experience tv spot they just dropped…
Many twists and turns. So many opportunities to overdo it that Raimi does not take. That is part of what makes this movie so much fun for such a wide base of audiences. It has some extreme moments. But Raimi doesn’t linger on any gore. The idea of those moments is enough.
Which brings me to the second heartbeat. Rachel McAdams.
I am not being excessive in saying that McAdams gives an Oscar-worthy performance here. She, of course, will not be considered for this movie. But I actually found myself shocked repeatedly and reminded of the greatness she possesses as an actor. I don’t know what was on the page and I don’t know what they shot and cut. But McAdams is able to layer an evolution of this character from her first scene to her last.
Her Linda starts as a stereotype… but not with McAdams. As an audience, we ache for this woman. This isn’t Annie Wilkes in Misery. She’s a social mess. She isn’t a cat lady… she’s a bird lady. She dresses terribly. But McAdams doesn’t fall into that trap… she stays right on the precipice with the performance, so the woman she evolves into on the island doesn’t feel like a gimmick.
One of the remarkable subtleties is that she carries a little more weight before the island… but again, in any other performance, the performer, filmmaker, and image team would emphasize it. Not here. It is there in the way she moves… how she carries herself… like someone who sits for a living and eats at her desk. And when they are stuck on the island, weight is shed slowly, consistently, and never calling attention to it. Even when there is a moment of, “Gee, Ms Jones… you are actually beautiful,” its a throwaway and they just keep moving.
As her Linda Liddle evolves on the island, McAdams adds small touches in each sequence, never calling attention to the changes, but they are there and she is playing them.
Mind you, this movie is a thriller/comedy. It’s a super-high-grade B-movie. But McAdams is doing a magic show with her performance that very few can do.
When I became aware of McAdams, it was in the The Hot Chick/Mean Girls/The Notebook/Red Eye/Wedding Crashers/The Family Stone window. When I met her, but wasn’t allowed to interview her, it was on the set of Wedding Crashers and I think only The Hot Chick (which I had skipped) and Mean Girls had been released. I had seen Mean Girls and New Line showed me The Notebook soon after and I got a DVD of The Hot Chick and I was shocked because it seemed like the work of 3 different actresses. None of the performances crossed over to the others. Each was its own unique set of ideas and skills. And then again on each of the other 3 movies.
Every director wanted her on his set. A dozen movies came and went over the next 6 years. Some hits, some misses. She was the lead in a few, mostly not. But the next time I saw the McA I was stunned by was in Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga in 2020. She matched Will Ferrell, madness for madness. Some loved her in Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret., and I liked her in it… but it wasn’t really a stretch of McA proportions.
But this one… at 46… an epic turn. Right now, she is the most underutilized killer acting app there is.
Someone else could have played the role and the movie would still have been fun. But McA raises it to another level. Raimi is having the time of his life. The basic idea, with fewer twists, still would have been a ton of fun. But then the twists take it higher.
I haven’t really told you much about the movie. Intentional. If you like the trailer and the tv ad above, you are the audience for this movie. If you don’t, you aren’t.
Last year, there were a series of similar efforts to make great B-movie romps: Love Hurts, Novocaine, Heart Eyes, and on a more expensive scale, Mickey 17. They all came up short on different levels. It’s a simplification, but in each case, the main idea was kinda the only idea.
Send Help has some big surprises, but mostly, it is the core idea… but the script gives waves to the idea and the 2 actors are pretty perfect in the roles… and the director loves to push it, though in this case, not far enough to scare people away. But as much as anything or more, watching Rachel McAdams navigate her character through the story… can’t stop watching her.
Have some real fun at the movies!
Until tomorrow…