What if you were stranded on a deserted island with the least likable person in your life? Not a mythical enemy, or your partner’s ex, your ex-husband, or a school bully — just someone you cannot stand at work. Someone who talks while eating, with an irritating voice, tuna sandwich scraps sliding from his lip to his cheek as he addresses you.
That situation has been stretched into a full Hollywood feature, combining a deserted-island survival movie with a horror comedy. The story, in short: Linda (Rachel McAdams, buried under makeup meant to make her slightly unattractive, complete with side bangs — good luck with that) is the nerdy, awkward employee at a company whose line of business is never quite clear. No one in the office likes her, least of all the new boss — handsome and repulsive (Dylan O’Brien) — who inherited the company from his father. He promotes his friends to VP positions promised to her, wants to get rid of her, but is convinced to give her one last chance. She joins a business trip to Thailand to present a project, but their plane crashes on a deserted island — you know the format.
Screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason and the Friday the 13th reboot) inform us that the heroine is an obsessive viewer of survival reality shows — how convenient — so it is clear that when the boss and his downtrodden employee crash on the island, the tables will turn. She becomes queen of the jungle, armed with near-supernatural abilities to build shelter and start fires learned from shows that have no real value in the modern world, while he is helpless, miserable and dependent on her. But Send Help is not particularly interesting because of its simple, self-writing concept or its flat characters, which sometimes seem pulled from a cartoon, but because of its director, Sam Raimi.
Raimi, 66, for those unfamiliar, was once a standard-bearer of gross, exaggerated horror — the splatter-filled, bodily-fluid-spraying kind of films watched drunk at midnight screenings. His main claim to fame is, of course, the Evil Dead trilogy from the 1980s and 1990s. His comic-book violence and warped humor surfaced in much of the era’s great cinema, including the films of the Coen brothers (he co-wrote The Hudsucker Proxy with them and appeared in cameos in several of their films; they co-wrote his underappreciated second film, Crimewave). He also helped launch Leonardo DiCaprio in the unhinged western The Quick and the Dead and, in my view, is responsible for one true masterpiece: the restrained, snowy 1990s crime film A Simple Plan, which still pops up endlessly on Israeli cable movie channels.
Raimi never quite became a household name, but to the general public he is best known, if at all, as the director of the original Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maguire.
As so often happens in Hollywood, great success was followed by a fall. The first two Spider-Man films were massive box office hits, earning hundreds of millions of dollars, and Raimi is also responsible for one of the most iconic images in cinema history: Kirsten Dunst kissing Spider-Man upside down. But Raimi also sold out a little. The Spider-Man films retained some of his dark humor — not a bad thing in itself — but nothing approaching the intensity of the filmmaking that had made Hollywood hire him in the first place. Then came the failed third installment (the Venom one, with Topher Grace, widely hated by fans, along with the infamous dancing Spider-Man scene).
Though the film is far from as terrible as its reputation, its 2007 release effectively ended Maguire’s career and damaged Raimi’s. He was humiliatingly fired from the franchise, went on to direct big projects that failed to land (does anyone remember his Wizard of Oz prequel with James Franco? The Wicked crowd prefers not to), failed to get the chance to direct The Hobbit despite wanting it badly, and was eventually hired by Marvel to direct Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Despite a few amusing death scenes, Raimi was essentially a hired hand. The early-2000s herald of comic-book cinema suddenly felt irrelevant.
Which brings us to Send Help, widely labeled as Raimi’s comeback film. On one hand, that is genuinely heartening: almost no one makes films like this anymore — Hollywood cinema not based on an existing brand, but on an idea, actors and a director with a distinctive style. In the horror genre — one that can be profitable, but usually only when made on the cheap — it is refreshing to see Hollywood indulging one of its veteran creators with a respectable budget, in a film unafraid of gore and bodily disgust in the mainstream, populated by characters who are, frankly, unpleasant people, and starring one of the last actresses you would expect to find in this kind of movie. (Though it is worth remembering that McAdams is not just a romantic-comedy star, but first and foremost Regina George from Mean Girls, perhaps the best black comedy to come out of Hollywood in the early 2000s.)
On the other hand, Send Help is also a film of “almost.” It never quite turns its extremity dial to 11 out of 10, as the subgenre demands, since its purpose is to shock. It never becomes so messed up that someone will remember a scene and say, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” And that is a shame.
Still, it has ambitions. At its core, Send Help is a movie about people who chew with their mouths open. This is not a joke. An enormous number of scenes and gags revolve around the mechanics and facial expressions of food moving between teeth, spilling in and out. Add drool, vomit and other substances — and honestly, even for those not fond of the genre, it is fairly funny. It has to be, because Send Help always hovers on the line between being the real thing and a parody. In fact, despite the film’s intentional silliness, its problem is that the “serious” side is so stupid and cartoonish that you do not really care about anything — and by the end, you should at least care about the protagonist.
A few minor examples: the douchebag boss and his evil friends are generic toxic men who play golf together and talk endlessly about lawns and swings, as if they wandered in from an 1980s Wall Street movie. They humiliate the nerdy employee as if this were a dated high school drama. Meanwhile, she lives alone with… a parrot, and talks to herself. And sorry — who watches Survivor these days? The plot mechanics feel lifted straight out of a 20-year-old screenwriting manual.
Even McAdams, who generally inspires an affectionate “how can you not love her?” thanks to her excellent taste in roles, does not quite convince as a rejected nerd. You cannot take one of the most beautiful women in the world, put her in a dowdy dress and lipstick on her teeth, then open with two unattractive coworkers desperately avoiding inviting her to karaoke because “she’s so gross,” and expect it to work. She is Rachel McAdams. What the film lacks in any kind of realism, it compensates for with playfulness. I would have liked more of it, but this is what we get.
What remains is a very pleasant film that carries on an amusing dialogue with earlier “stranded on an island” movies, especially Lina Wertmüller’s sensual, cult 1974 Italian classic Swept Away, about a rich woman and poor man whose power dynamic flips after they are stranded together (there was also a disastrous remake starring Madonna). Here, in the name of feminism, the roles are reversed — the woman is strong, the man is weak — and the level of sexual tension is lowered to minus 10, because this is still a Hollywood movie. Children might see it. A murderous wild boar is perfectly acceptable. Sex on an island between two adults? Absolutely not. There are also a few jokes about The Blue Lagoon starring Brooke Shields, and the ending outright plagiarizes the finale of one of the most acclaimed films in world cinema in recent years, a Cannes winner that also opened the Jerusalem Film Festival a few years ago. I will not name it, as anyone who has seen it would immediately have the twist spoiled.
The result is a likable Hollywood film, leaning on better movies, enjoyable while it lasts. One final gripe: “Sam Raimi’s comeback film”? He already had one. It was called Drag Me to Hell in 2009, made right after he endured hell on Spider-Man. That film, too, playfully and relatively extremely by Hollywood standards, centered on a beautiful, seemingly angelic American woman put through seven circles of torment, with people literally vomiting on her and tons of black humor. It was better — but Send Help is charming too.