Sam Raimi is back with this violent black comedy scripted by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, set on a desert island where two plane-wreck survivors are facing off. It\u2019s a movie whose entertaining initial premise and shrewd satire are finally damaged by Raimi\u2019s need to juice everything up with spurious \u201chorror\u201d flourishes for the fanbase, on-brand gore eruptions that aren\u2019t really scary and undermine the film\u2019s believability, turning everything into silliness. The poster and promotional materials promise a \u201chorror\u201d film, but that isn\u2019t really what this is. But what is it? Well, it\u2019s a desert island parable that owes something to JM Barrie\u2019s The Admirable Crichton and to \u2026 how to say it? \u2026 other dramas. No spoilers, but Raimi appearing to borrow from a recent Cannes Palme d\u2019Or winner was not, as they say, on my bingo card.<\/p>\n
Rachel McAdams plays nerdy Linda Liddle, a single woman living alone with a caged bird. She\u2019s devoted to her job. She is an extremely smart researcher in a corporation, but is passed over for promotion by the charmless misogynists running the firm: useless, untalented males in Patrick Bateman suits who depend on her work. Chief among these odious sexists is new CEO Bradley Preston, played by Dylan O\u2019Brien, a vacuous smoothie and nepo princeling whose late father, the company founder, valued Linda enough to promise her a VP position \u2013 a promise on which the hateful Bradley now smugly reneges.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
He and his ghastly bros mock and humiliate her, especially her ambition to be on a top-rated \u201csurvivor\u201d TV show. They find her audition footage online \u2013 which shows how skilful she is at bushcraft, making fires and shelters, etc \u2013 and giggle over it. But they can\u2019t avoid bringing Linda with them for a business conference in Thailand on the firm\u2019s private jet, and when this crashes on a remote island in a storm, with the only survivors being gutsy, capable Linda and spoiled alpha-idiot Bradley \u2026 well, guess who the boss is now?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a time-honoured and perfectly enjoyable setup, and the first act, when the new reality dawns on clueless Bradley, is watchable. But the plot twists are derivative and the action then becomes dependent on weird stabs of grisliness that are not convincing or consistent with the characterisation. By the end, it\u2019s exasperating \u2013 but McAdams delivers a solid performance.<\/p>\n
Send Help is out on 29 January in Australia, 30 January in the US, and 5 February in the UK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Raimi is back with this violent black comedy scripted by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, set on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-434872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}