Review: SEND HELP – Don’t Bother
I didn’t like Sam Raimi’s Send Help. It tries too hard and ultimately doesn’t go far enough in its excesses. Rami is a director who can be deliciously subversive when he wants to be (see Drag Me To Hell) and he used to be a down and dirty filmmaker who would push his audience to the limit. Years working in the realm of big budget studio movies (see Oz: The Great And Powerful) appear to have blunted his edge. It’s pitched as horror black comedy – think Castaway meets Misery – but Send Help is not dark enough and the humour fails to land.
Send Help begins with a prologue which is way too long, where we meet Rachel McAdams’ Linda, a put upon employee of Dylan O’Brien’s CEO, Bradley. When a plane crash leaves them as the only survivors on a desert island, their power dynamic shifts and they must work together in order to survive, while their tensions begin to rise to the surface. Frankly, I had no empathy for these characters, they were both unlikeable – and that’s not a good place to be in, when you’re stuck with them for two hours.
Like Peter Jackson before him, Raimi is a filmmaker who started as an outsider in the world of horror, but has now become part of the establishment. 30 years ago he would have really gone to town with something like Send Help – and just when you think he’s about to push things to a darker realm, he pulls away. A shame. Send Help has a strong central premise and the island setting could have added an extra level of brutality of man (and woman) versus nature. However, the area where they set up camp looks like a beach resort and you get the feeling that McAdams and O’Brien are about six feet away from a Tiki bar serving piña coladas. There’s also stage-bound cliff setting that’s central to the plot which has absolutely no sense of peril – odd considering that key moments of tension are supposed to take place there.
I’ll admit that there’s a solid plot twist that occurs in the last act – but it doesn’t really make sense if you delve too deeply into it. This might have worked a little better if it was revealed at the mid-way point, as it would have helped give the audience (and the characters) something new to focus on.
Send Help is a film that just sits there. There was probably a gnarly early draft of the screenplay that got neutered by studio notes to make it more palatable to a mainstream audience. What’s left is just an overlit, garish corporate product that feels like it was made to fill a release date or take up space on a streaming service.
