True to her name, Linda Liddle shrinks into the background. She’s the awkward coworker who always corners you in the break room and eats tuna in her cubicle. Linda has her sights set on a management position — after all, she’s the one who’s up all night writing reports — but she doesn’t fit in with the Gen Z finance bros who run such a slick corporate firm.
Maybe it’s a stretch to cast Rachel McAdams, one of the most effortlessly charming actors around, in this role. But her performance is the best thing about Send Help, director Sam Raimi’s long-overdue return to the campy mayhem he made his name with. If only the movie were as brutal and blithely mean-spirited as his best work.
Most of the film is set not in the office but on a deserted island. A private plane crashes nearby and the only survivors are Linda and her much younger boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who has inherited the position from his father. He’d probably rather have died in the wreckage than spend any time with someone like Linda.
But Linda sees this as her opportunity to finally get the upper hand. And because she’s a hobby survivalist — she was probably dreaming of a life-or-death scenario like this — she knows how to start a fire and catch fish and build a hut out of banana leaves. It starts like Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away, with the underling and the employer swapping power positions. Then, as that power goes to Linda’s head, she starts to move into Misery territory, most obviously when she delivers a monologue that reminds us of the one Kathy Bates gives before taking a sledgehammer to James Caan’s ankles.
In fact, most of the twists in Send Help are lifted from other movies, and in its facile, O. Henry-lite ending, it’s yet another recent class-conscious thriller that doesn’t go far enough. I wish Raimi had pushed this material to the brink, and that his style had built to a beautiful frenzy.
Compare it to his last true thriller, 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, and it comes off as pretty thin gruel. That film, released during the fever pitch of the financial crisis, was also a parable about wealth inequality, and it was nasty, cartoonish and driven by cruel, twisted irony. It was like a great episode of Tales from the Crypt.
Send Help is about as safe and palatable as a movie with arterial spray and projectile vomit can be. My feelings are summed up in the scene that most resembles Raimi’s 1987 masterpiece Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn. In it, Linda is attacked by a wild boar on the island, and she has to stab it, and stab it, and stab it again — and it just won’t die. It’s funny and sick in the moment, but then it makes you wonder: why isn’t there more of this in the movie, and why is Raimi, the king of rubbery practical effects, using such ugly and unconvincing CGI instead of a great-looking puppet?
The movie’s ideas are similarly plastic, although McAdams’s performance is pitched at just the right note. But I’m just happy to see Raimi back in the swing of things, and I hope he really gets his claws out for the next one.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101,” Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.