Send Help Movie Review: Brilliant Dark Comedy By Sam Raimi!
Send Help Movie Review and Ratings
Cast: Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert
Directed By: Sam Raimi
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars)
Sam Raimi is back. Send Help is a film that mixes many exquisitely 90s influences, from the survival movie to the slasher, creating a particular and compelling dark comedy. It is certainly thanks to the creativity of a director capable of giving his best in smaller productions that, even when co-produced by a large studio like 20th Century, manage to freely express all of their author’s cinema. If it didn’t have the name of an iconic director like Sam Raimi printed as a guarantee, “Send Help” would be one of those many studio films made and launched in theaters to be quickly forgotten. We confess that even with the name of an iconic director like Sam Raimi printed as a guarantee, we don’t feel like entrusting Send Help with any other kind of fate. Even when he signs seemingly “normal” projects, Sam Raimi remains fundamentally a horror director, even going so far as to turn Stephen Strange into a zombie in the Marvel film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
It is therefore always a pleasure when the author of La casa announces that he has something more classically thrilling in the works, as in the case of this new feature film which has two peculiar characteristics in Raimi’s filmography: it is his first film with an original story (written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift) since Drag Me to Hell (dated 2009), and the first to be R-rated in the United States since The Gift, released in 2000. For this reason, we welcomed with great curiosity and a pinch of anxiety Send Help, which seemed to have what it took to be the author’s return to the atmosphere and tone that had made us appreciate it throughout his career. And, after seeing it, we can consider ourselves satisfied with what the author has packaged, relying on strong names like Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien as protagonists, but above all, with that taste for excess that makes it unique.
Send Help Movie Review: The Story Plot
Linda Liddle has been working for years in the planning and strategy department of an unspecified company, and her efficiency has earned her the promise of a promotion from the recently deceased CEO (a photographic cameo by Bruce Campbell, Raimi’s fetish actor and best friend). It’s a shame that new boss Bradley Preston, the deceased’s son, has somewhat’ retrograde ideas on the matter and decides to level up Linda’s colleague, who is quite incompetent but a longtime friend of the scion.
Pretending to be willing to change his mind, he suggests that Linda accompany him to Thailand for a merger, intending to leave her at the local headquarters once the deal is finalized. However, the journey is interrupted by an accident during the flight, and so Linda and Bradley find themselves on a deserted island. And the sexist boss realizes that at this point, his life depends entirely on the person he has consistently underestimated, as Linda, passionate about shows like Survivor, knows exactly how to get by in these cases. As Giovanni Storti would say, the situation is turning around…
Send Help Movie Review and Analysis
The script isn’t about two fine pens – Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who have things like Friday vs. Jason, the reboot Friday the 13th, and the film adaptation of Baywatch under their belt – and Send Help at least doesn’t even try to disguise itself as something it isn’t. But what is, is still little. A disorganized operetta in the wake of the film genre ‘good for her’ (‘good for her’) would be to say stories where female protagonists obtain revenge after lives of injustice. In which, however, the victim is a Raimi tamed within the confines of a truly weak film, late in his own attempts to elicit laughter, who emerges here and there in the face of Linda’s syrupy behavior, who shields herself in her own way from Bradley’s pettiness. And where the director is left with only a few obliquities of direction, fleeting delusions, a bit of gore, and a hint of peeling.
Exactly, little thing. With its recognizable horror touch, somewhere between macabre and a little’ camp, exaggerated with pride and with charged and caricatural tones, which remains dormant under the sand waiting for an inevitable crescendo, however tight within the meshes of a tried and tested cinema, drugged by the patina of a Robinson Crusoe who is never allowed to seriously derail. This film seems Raimi had to do it since 2019, even before the release of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, sortied into the fence of the most industrial and supervised cinema there is, that is, that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which, however, allowed Raimi to be a decent Raimi overall.
The weapon in more than one movie, like Send Help, is that you think you know exactly what to expect scene after scene, and you eagerly await that sooner or later everything that happens on screen will explode sonically. All this, without going into too many spoilers, certainly happens, but following a skillfully rhythmic construction between tension, drama, and humor, in a true tragicomedy with a splatter ending. Send Help has, in fact, the ability, while telling a fundamentally small and simple story, to surprise with unexpected twists, and even when what happens on screen is largely predictable, Sam Raimi‘s “touch” adds its own, enriching the staging with over-the-top elements, sometimes with a joke, sometimes with a look, sometimes with a bolder camera movement.
At the end of the day, Send Help builds is a story of “black redemption”, a distorted and tragicomic revenge of the excluded, a cruel revenge that knows it is catharsis. Seasoned and embellished with Raimi’s cinema, which combines the comic with the grotesque, the drama with the truculent, and cloaks the entire film in an exquisitely vintage patina: both in the choice of locations and in the use of special effects (which are sometimes explicitly and deliberately fake), Send Help doesn’t revolutionize or particularly change Sam Raimi’s cinema, if anything it confirms his aura as a handcrafted and unconventional horror filmmaker: it seems like Cast Away meets Evil Dead. And that’s fine, very well, in fact, like that.
Raimi chooses his cast well, because Linda and Bradley are played on screen by Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, who prove perfect for their respective roles: McAdams keeps herself in perfect balance between Linda’s insecurities ex officio and the determination of the one on the island, where his passion for certain survival programs is rewarded. Likewise, Dylan O’Brien manages to be both braggart and self-confident, fragile and vulnerable once taken away from the entrepreneurial habitat that is congenial to him.
The two are not only good at sketching their respective characters’ characters, but also put themselves at the service of Sam Raimi in what is also a physical test, in which survival on the desert island translates into a series of borderline situations that aim to affect, as well as amuse, the spectator. And it comes to mind a scene in particular in which it is impossible not to participate, emotionally and physically, in what they are experiencing.
Right in these extreme situations, the taste for a certain type of staging by Sam Raimi emerges. Starting from the splendid sequence of the plane crash, up to some drifts more properly horror, the director of The Evel Dead chooses the right tone with which to tell this story, moving with a balance between blood and fun, between incorrectness and message: in fact, an interesting reversal of the roles between Bradley and Linda, between male and female, is also outlined, fitting perfectly into contemporary reality. A sensible speech, which, however, appears partial, incomplete, or perhaps not entirely in focus, but it is a forgivable flaw given that the film’s focus and intent are different from social criticism.
The author’s stylistic signature is there, and it is at the service of the story, between frenetic runs through the vegetation of the island, the general dynamism of the filming, and that taste for excess that we have learned to love in the past. Those who appreciate that side of Sam Raimi will be happy to find it in a more thriller than true horror, but no less impactful.
The speech on Send Help It wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t delve further into the behind-the-scenes with another element as important as the faces appearing on stage: if Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien there are clear references for the viewer, the same can be said of a composer like Danny Elfman, who continues his artistic partnership with Sam Raimi that began already at the time of Darkman and continued among other titles with the Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. As often happens when he is involved, Elfman is an added value in underlining the tone and construction of Sam Raimi‘s sequences, contributing to the right reading key, and that tasty touch of the director in translating the survival thriller story of Send Help.
Send Help Movie Review: The Last Words
We happily welcome the return of Sam Raimi, who, with Send Help, donates his taste for excess to a survival thriller that works. Despite a certain incompleteness in addressing the issue of role-reversal, the film does its job of maintaining tension and entertaining the audience by guessing the right tone to tell this story. The two protagonists, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, are excellent, with special mention for a sequence in which one cannot help but participate in the suffering shown on screen.
As always, Danny Elfman’s contribution to the soundtrack is an added value, as he emphasizes the action in the right way. Send Help is a brilliant dark comedy by Sam Raimi: a survival-revenge movie that proudly remains faithful to classic elements of a certain 90s cinema. A film that is also, in some ways, a distorted satire on class struggle, which manages to amuse and surprise even when it seems that the narrative development is now largely predictable.
