From the days of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the notion of having to survive on a picturesque, but ultimately lethal island has enticed various storytellers to offer up their take. As a result, everyone from Brooke Shields, to Oliver Reed, to even Tom fucking Hanks has spent some time marooned away from civilisation as they try to make fire and figure out what forms of sustenance won’t cause them to have explosive diarrhea.
However, it seems that we haven’t seen anything yet as the master of mischief himself, Sam Raimi, has chosen to throw his hand-woven grass hat into the ring with Send Help, a movie that sees everything from office politics to projectile vomiting become fair game for his brutal battle of the stranded sexes.
But as this is his first stand alone project that isn’t based on an existing IP since Drag Me To Hell, has my all-time favorite director still got the chutzpah to fling bodily fluids and stage gruesome slap stick with the best of them? He so does, isle have you know…
Linda Liddle is a corporate strategist who stands out from her fellow workers due to her dowdy, meek demeanor and a goofy personality that masks the fact that she’s really good at her job. In fact, she’s so good, the ailing CEO of the company had all but promised her a promotion to Vice President once he popped his clogs – but in the wake of his passing, his son, Bradley Preston, has some different ideas in mind. As Bradley is something of a shallow prick, the fact that he finds the rumpled Linda quite repulsive means that he’s already decided to give her promised promotion to his golfing buddy.
While Linda argues her case, Bradley agrees to bring her along on a very important deal in Bangkok to abuse her gift for numbers before callously banishing her to a dead-end position – but while Linda is continually teased on the flight over, fate has something of a Texas switch in store.
After the plane crashes in the midst of a violent storm, both Linda and Bradley are washed up on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. However, while a wounded Bradley flounders when it comes to having any survival skills in the face of his predicament, Linda positively blossoms thanks to a deep interest in this sort of thing, building shelter, catching food and taking to this whole stranded lark like a natural.
However, this is where both Linda and Bradley start to ominously diverge, with the latter finding the change in the power dynamic too much to bear and the fact that Linda would be quite happy to stay in her personal little paradise indefinitely making him start to plot.
As both start pushing each other’s boundaries, their actions soon veer from erratic to outright combative and soon the pair are at each other’s throats when some shocking revelations metaphorically wash ashore…
Sam Raimi’s been my go-to guy for mean-spirited thrills and yucks (both kinds) ever since a much younger me watched him flamboyantly knock seven shades of shit out of Bruce Campbell during the mind blowing entirety of Evil Dead II. However, since The halcyon days of the hilariously cruel Drag Me To Hell, Raimi’s influence has been frustratingly light as he’s only made Oz The Great And Powerful and Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness since. Thankfully, with Send Hend, Hollywood’s most impish filmmaker has stopped playing in other people’s sandboxes and found an entire beach to plow his own furrow. The result is a refreshing, viciously funny battle of the sexes that allows the director to fully indulge in his gleefully, mean spirited humour as he heaps various indignities on its cast
In fact, I can’t think of any other filmmaker that would take such a hot button topics, but still ensures that he has numerous scenes that include gross-out moments involving puke, blood and snot spraying directly in the face of its impressively willing cast. After decades of cinematically abusing the likes of Liam Neeson, Russell Crowe, Tobey Maguire, Alison Lohman and the entire cast of three Evil Dead movies, it’s now the turn of Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien to entertainingly suffer for their art and both are exemplary. O’Brien attacks his role as a young, CEO douche bag with a surprising amount of range, starting off blasting people with a shit-eating Ray Liotta laugh and visibly recoiling at a bit of tuna stuck on the corner of Linda’s mouth, to desperately spiralling when he realises that all of his power has evaporated in favour of his subordinate. On the flip side, Rachel McAdams is magnificent, making Linda’s journey from toe-curling doormat, to capable jungle queen, to obsessive lunatic absolutely fascinating and while the transition if fascinating to watch, it’s also extraordinarily funny.
While some Raimi purists might argue that the director is holding off on some of his more audacious camera moves, that endearingly spiteful streak is evident in virtually every frame. Watch as how pathetic Bradley gets in his attempts to go it alone, Linda be comes more flamboyantly capable, weaving herself hats and a cute little knapsack while producing meals so succulent they could be on the cover of a magazine. Of course, just because Raimi isn’t turning his gonzo abilities up to Evil Dead II or Drag Me To Hell levels, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t bust out some of those patented, stylised moments here and there. Be it McAdams getting coated in layers of gore and mucus when she tries hunting a boar, to some poison berries causing some projectile vomiting directly into O’Brien’s upturned face, Send Help simply can’t help trying to gross you out whenever it can and even Raimi’s sizable horror fan base will rejoice when he decides to get really mean. The memorable plane crash allows Sam the man to indulge in some of that ghastly slapstick he’s so fond of and we even have a sequence that allows him to go full “spook-a-blast” (his loving term for a fairground type scare) to magnificent, scream/laugh inducing effect.
It’s good to know that even in a time where such things as inequality and toxic behavior are taken very seriously, Raimi still knows how to have fun with them in a way that’s both refined and yet still really, really silly. I mean who else would take such a power struggle and yet still have your sympathies and alliances veer, swinging pendulum style, between both traumatised, trust fund nepobaby and marginalised, picked-on lunatic? And who else who ensure that it’s regularly interspersed with weirdly malicious violence? Sam fucking Raimi, that’s who.
As socially relevant as it is cheerfully brutal, Send Help not only proves to be a triumph for Raimi’s latest return to directing, but also sees the team of McAdams and O’Brien go all out to help their tense predicament to virtually (and literally) splurge out of the screen. More original projects for the director, please, preferably ones that let him continue to be a prankish little shit.
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