Sam Raimi’s survival thriller Send Help needs rescuing

Send Help (NC16)

113 minutes, opens on Jan 29

★★☆☆☆

The story: Despite being the linchpin of her company, executive Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is bullied by co-workers, especially the new head of the company Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), a sexist snob who denies her a promised promotion so that his fraternity buddies can get ahead. Their corporate jet crashes near a deserted tropical island, leaving Preston and her the only survivors. An uneasy truce is declared.

This misfire – too restrained to be a horror-comedy, too derivative to work as a thriller – comes from American director Sam Raimi, a Hollywood legend known for big-budget action (the first Spider-Man trilogy, 2002 to 2007; Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, 2022).

He got his start in horror with the Evil Dead trilogy (1981 to 1992), with Send Help bringing him back to splatter roots. His trademark moves – such as physical comedy, blood spurts and wince-inducing injuries – are all here.

This should be good news to fans of his style. But this is no Drag Me To Hell (2009) or Army Of Darkness (1992), supernatural thrillers directed by Raimi and co-written by him and his brother Ivan.

Send Help’s writers are Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who also penned the action-comedy Baywatch (2017), a big-screen parody of the television show that ran in various forms from 1989 to 2001.

In the opening set-up, Linda is bullied and gaslighted in games of office politics that consist of warmed-over sitcom tropes. Are these scenes a parody of an office sitcom, in the same way that the Baywatch movie was satirical? Likewise, are the island sequences winking at romantic stories set among marooned survivors? Perhaps.

But as they are, the scenes are neither here nor there.

The office skits are meant to make Linda’s agony feel human and relatable, but her social problems seem fixable by anyone with a modicum of smarts, the kind she is supposed to possess in spades. The fact that she gives up the fight at the slightest provocation is such a ham-fisted attempt at making her a victim that it ruins the rest of the story.

Send Help has a problem common in action and horror. Its creators believe that as long as the explosions and stabbings in the latter half are spectacular enough, audiences will not care, or at least not remember, what came before.

Raimi’s best movies have operated in a heightened, slightly cartoonish reality, a choice helped by the supernatural and fantasy elements featuring superheroes, demons or the undead. This film’s realistic setting pushes him out of his comfort zone, and it shows.

Hot take: Raimi’s trademark gore and slapstick, while well executed, cannot salvage a film undermined by weak writing that makes rooting for the victim impossible.