The last 25 years of moviegoing…okay, the last 15 or so…have taught me that I’m part of a shrinking fraternity…a diminishing HE collective that, outside of film festival fare, is always looking for but rarely getting a semblance of human realism in movies…stories and characters that add up to some kind of understandable motivational reality…even (or should I say particularly?) in comedies…films with stories and characters that present at least a vague semblance of the behavior that we’ve all come to understand from real-life humanoids.
Sam Raimi‘s Send Help, which I twitched and spasm’ed through last night, is aggressively anti-realist. Hell, the script (co-written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift) pisses upon the HE fraternity.
The story, if you want to call it that, is a kind of extremist, wink-wink, feminist farce by way of an old-time formula that first launched way back with The African Queen (’51) — an antagonistic man and woman, both willful and stubborn, are forced to survive on a tropical island or in some remote locale after being shipwrecked or plane-wrecked or war-wrecked, and then gradually warm to each other.
Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away (’74) comes to mind, only that time it was a primitive working-class guy (Giancarlo Giannini) who took command, only to end up with his heart broken. Ditto Ivan Reitman‘s Six Days, Seven Nights (’98) and, most recently, Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness (’22).
Send Help is a Survivor thing with a turning of the the tables that we’re not supposed to see coming. But if you know Raimi, particularly his disregard for believable behavior and his generally perverse horror instincts, you know Send Help is going to go all wackazoid and nonsensical by the halfway mark.
It’s basically a revenge-horror flick about bringing pain and suffering to the proverbial bad guys (i.e., typically arrogant and ultra-privleged Millennial and Zoomer snots), and trust me when I tell you that watching it is like lying on salty beach sand while Raimi, Shannon and Swift lean over and vomit in our faces.
Alternate analogy: It’s also like Raimi, Shannon and Swift sawing the tops of their heads off, taking their brains out of their heads and mashing them together into a big mushy wad and flinging the pink brain matter upon a stone wall…splat!…gaaaahhh!
It starts out as a crudely exaggerated portrait of a meek 40something mouseburger named Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) who despises her haughty, to-the-manor-born boss, Bradley Preston (the 34 year-old Dylan O’Brien), primarily for having passed her over, promotion-wise.
But anyone who looks and behaves like Liddle would almost certainly suffer the same fate in any slick office environment.
Does it make any sense at all that a woman working in a chilly corporate realm wouldn’t make an effort to keep herself ultra-tidy and cosmopolitan and well-groomed as possible, as well as behave in a politically advantageous way with her co-workers? No, it doesn’t, but McAdams ignores these basic rules anyway and is shocked — shocked! — when she suffers politically for her Mrs. Gooch appearance and for being a private weekend drunk and eating smelly tunafish asandwiches at her desk, etc.
Linda and Bradley are, of course, the only survivors of a Pacific Ocean plane crash. (The CG is fairly awful, by the way.) Once they arrive on the verdant island, Linda not only enjoys the upper hand as far as basic survival skills are concerned, but becomes a much more physically beautiful person. She blooms into a kind of nature goddess, and this, unquestionably, is the most enjoyable section of the film. I actually started to feel hopeful. Go, Linda!
But then, Raimi being Raimi, Send Help goes stark raving mad around the 45-minute mark, certainly by the end of the first hour. And then McAdams breaks the fourth wall at the very end, looking straight into the camera lens as she delivers a winking message to the millions of Linda Liddles out there, and it’s like “WHAT?”
Written a few years back: Last night I watched a high-def stream of Sam Raimi‘s A Simple Plan (’98), which still seems like his finest film ever — the best written (by Scott Smith), the best acted (particularly by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda), the most thrillingly plotted, and certainly the most morally complex.
I hadn’t seen it for 15 or 16 years. It holds up and then some. A filthy lucre film on the level of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fargo, Macbeth (particularly when you think of Fonda’s Lady Macbeth-like wife), Of Mice and Men, etc. But it got me to wondering why Raimi never again came close to making anything like it.
For The Love Of The Game followed A Simple Plan, and then The Gift. And then, for the last couple of decades, web-casting and fantasy — Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Drag Me to Hell and Oz the Great and Powerful. Raimi mades his bones in cult horror (Evil Dead flicks, Darkman, Army of Darkness), and then seemed to step into the world-class, award-calibre league with A Simple Plan, and then…you tell me.