Joel on Film

Did you hear the one about the awkward woman and the douchebag boss and how surviving a plane crash on a remote island shifted the gender and power dynamics between them? The screenplay for Send Help, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, treats the ideas that automatically arise from that opening, rhetorical question as it sounds from the framing: as a fairly broad joke, told with devious glee by director Sam Raimi. This is a twisted horror-comedy from one of the filmmakers most adept at crafting one, and even if it doesn’t actually dig deep into that shifting dynamic, the movie certainly takes the piss out of toxic work environments.

The set-up here is deceptively brilliant: Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), who has been shunted to the side at her office job as a corporate strategist, now must contend with a new boss who is highly unlikely to see more value in her than the old one. Indeed, the old boss is now dead, and his unqualified, dismissive son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) makes quite clear that he, in fact, sees less value in Linda than his father did. Maybe it doesn’t help, for instance, that the pair’s initial introduction (and, though he predictably forgot about the first one, second meeting) occurs just moments after Linda has eaten a tuna sandwich—leaving a bit of the meal on the corner of her mouth, unfortunately.

Is it any wonder, then, that Bradley promotes his equally unfortunate college BFF Donovan (Xavier Samuel), who literally just boxed Linda out of the conference room and passed off her data analytics as his own, to the position of Vice President of her department. For someone who has devoted seven years of her miserable life to this company, of course it’s an injustice worthy of a yelling exercise in her car to relieve the strain. This is all uncomfortably funny and fully infuriating stuff, and Raimi underlines it all in bold by employing some extreme close-ups and the brash performances of the office staff (Dennis Haysbert appears briefly as a veteran of the company, whom Bradley does not spare from humiliation).

This, though, is eventually a two-hander, as the company jet, headed to Thailand to detail a merger, crash-lands on an island god-knows-where or how far from their destination. Linda and Bradley are the only survivors (the film’s 3-D presentation comes through strongest here, where the smallest of body parts and bone fragments flies toward the audience), and here’s where the true sauce of the material is located. Bradley underestimates Linda’s obsession with a certain reality-survival show and, once he wakes up from receiving a nasty leg wound, expects her to focus on finding a way back home.

The actually smart decision, of course, is to remain alive until such a time as trying to find help, but this is a movie about two wildly disparate ideas about survival. Bradley, who would rather always take the easy way out, sort of assumes he’s still in charge. Linda, who is fully prepared to spend as long on this island as necessary, helpfully reminds her companion that they’re no longer in the office.

The performances here are exceptionally attuned to Raimi’s intentions with this material, which relies on the actors’ precision in a wildly off-kilter scenario. O’Brien makes us despise every fiber of Bradley’s being, while acknowledging some buried humanity in the hidden parts of his personality. McAdams, who somehow always essays a character in a way that warrants calling her a “revelation” (though, one supposes, she can’t always be that), is hilarious and headstrong and, finally, unhinged in a role that evolves more unpredictably than we might initially guess.

The movie does eventually stretch its one-joke idea to some cartoonish extremes, such as an encounter with an island boar that is genuinely quite funny and gruesome, but also a little undercut by some obvious and imprecise digital effects. The film’s climax, too, throws a lot of ideas, as well as a few twists and one major revelation that doesn’t quite justify itself, at the screen in the hopes of something hitting a target. If a major studio movie like this inspires the criticism that it’s technically doing a little too much, well, that’s a worthy price.

How often, after all, can we say something other than that a movie is doing far too little to realize its ambitions? Send Help doesn’t have particularly deep ambitions, but it does have some simpler and more important ones: to make us laugh in recognition and sympathy and to make us squirm at the same time, which it certainly accomplishes in spades.

Rating: *** (out of ****)