I’ve been a fan of Sam Raimi’s cartoonish, mean-spirited, and endlessly creative filmmaking since I was a kid, so watching “Send Help,” his newest film, when it debuted in theaters on Jan. 30 was a delight.
When I was little, I’d obsessively rewatch “Spider-Man 2” and “Army of Darkness,” two of Raimi’s more kid-friendly offerings. The same wild camera movements, Looney Tunes character behavior, and simple story structures pushed to their limits I fell in love with as a kid were all present in “Send Help.”
The film follows Linda Liddle, an oddball bird-lady accountant, played by Rachel McAdams, who doesn’t fit in with the misogynistic corporate culture in her office. Her new sexist boss, played by Dylan O’Brien, passes her over for a promotion but teases her with a chance at getting it if she accompanies him and his cronies on a private jet to Bangkok for a merger deal.
Things go awry, and the plane crashes in the ocean, leaving Linda and her boss, Bradley, as the sole survivors on a deserted island. The pair is in luck, though, as Linda has been reading survivalist books her whole life and is so obsessed with the show “Survivor” that she auditioned for it.
From there, a slew of backstabbings, tested loyalties, psychosexual tensions, violent encounters, and desperate escape attempts ensue. The film rushes through the setup to get to the main event: two underused actors with great chemistry yelling at each other and occasionally trying to kill each other for 100 minutes. It will make you laugh with its goofy dialogue and then gross you out with a shocking amount of mud, vomit, and blood — as all movies quite frankly should.
While I wasn’t super familiar with O’Brien outside of his role as Thomas in the movie adaptations of “The Maze Runner” books 10 years ago, I thought he was outstanding here. His villainous cackle, wide-eyed, horrified whimpers, and slapstick injured acting reminded me of Bruce Campbell’s powerhouse comedic turns in Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series.
But this is mostly McAdams’ movie. An actor everyone in my generation knows from “Mean Girls” and “The Notebook,” McAdams has felt underappreciated in the last decade. With fewer and fewer opportunities to flex what she can do outside of supporting roles, the only film I’ve seen that utilized her in a meaningful way is “Spotlight” a decade ago.
In “Send Help,” though, McAdams is given free rein to go nuts. She gets to play lovable loser, blood-soaked survivalist, manic slasher villain, and twisted torturer within the same story. I can’t express how much fun it is to watch her performance contort and evolve throughout the movie; she kills it — literally.
The visual language here is so much more engaging than just about any movie you’re going to see this year, too. Raimi has always been the master of visual storytelling. He communicates character and feeling through camera movement rather than dialogue masterfully.
Early in the film, when Linda meets Bradley for the first time, Raimi inserts a close-up wide-angle shot of a piece of tuna on Linda’s lip, then cuts to a hyper close-up shot of Bradley’s eye struggling to avoid looking down at it.
Without either character expressing their embarrassment or disgust, Raimi conveys their feelings and instills the same feeling in the audience in a way a simple two-shot conversation would not have accomplished as effectively.
It’s refreshing, too, to see an original thriller concept executed like this. It wasn’t tossed off to streaming or elevated into a prestige movie, and it just delivers on being an exceptionally crafted thrill ride.
As a die-hard fan of Raimi, I found this film to be a return to form after his franchise work in “Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness” and “Oz: The Great and Powerful.”
With a remarkably fun performance from McAdams at the center, there is no way anyone reading this will not have a great time at the movies watching “Send Help.”