SEND HELP Review: An Overlong and Confounding Slog

The places on the internet that tell you what genre a movie is all have Send Help listed as horror and thriller; only one of them includes comedy along with the other two.

There is exactly one sequence in Send Help that aims to be scary and it's a dream sequence; other than that, the closest it gets to horror are a few horribly digital gore effects. In theory, the movie's attempting to be thrilling throughout, but it telegraphs its narrative developments aggressively and never takes time to make us care about its characters, so it's incapable of building any tension. The only thing that sometimes works is the comedy.

Send Help opens by introducing us to Linda (Rachel McAdams), a hardworking member of a successful consulting firm's Strategy and Planning team who lives alone with her pet bird and loves Survivor. She always looks frazzled, with scraggly hair and a wardrobe that just barely passes muster as officewear. Most of her colleagues steer clear of her as much as they can, not just because she's socially awkward, but also because of the tuna sandwiches she regularly brings for lunch that leave their stench on her.

The movie doesn't so much get the audience on Linda's side as it gets us to pity her, something that's done more through contrast than any significant character development. That contrast comes in the form of Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), the arrogant and obnoxious new CEO who's taking over after his father's death. Bradley wears expensive suits, casually implies sexual quid pro quo with young women in the office, and wants to promote his golf buddy to the Vice President position his late father promised Linda.

When Linda learns about this, she confronts him and he is as professionally cruel as possible, telling her that he needs a people person in a VP position. He admires that she confronted him, though, so he invites her to come with him and a few other high-ranking men on a flight to Bangkok for a merger meeting. The private plane then runs into a storm, providing the movie's best comically violent sequence, and leaving Linda and Bradley stranded on an island somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand.

It almost seems like the premise for a romantic comedy in which the pair fall in love over the course of their trial and the handsome misogynist learns the error of his ways through the love of a good woman. Thankfully, Send Help nods at these films without ever taking steps towards becoming one. The problem is it doesn't really become anything else, either.

At first, the two snipe at each other and McAdams asserts her dominance as a survivalist, sparking a grudging respect and perhaps even affection in some scenes that are fairly funny. When she nurtures him back to health in the immediate aftermath of the crash, the movie mines her feeding him fish that he thinks is gross for all it's worth in silly faces and squirming around. Both actors deserve significant praise for so fully committing to going big throughout to keep things as entertaining as possible.

As it goes on and suspicions arise between the two, though, Send Help just gets stuck. It doesn't have any forward momentum, and its characterization is so thin that the twists and turns of the leads' alternately cooperative and combative relationship are either too obvious or wholly unbelievable with no middle ground for real excitement or intrigue. Adding insult to injury, the movie clocks in at an unfathomable 113 minutes.

This is, of course, a Sam Raimi picture, and one might hope that his filmmaking would keep things engaging. Sadly, the few classic Raimi-isms here (a rushing POV camera, outrageous levels of blood and other bodily fluids, and so forth) simply inspire "oh that's very Raimi" thoughts rather than injecting any energy into the proceedings. Watching Send Help feels very similar to watching his last outing, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a movie largely bound by a house style with a personal flourish every so often. In Send Help, the few instances of gross-out humor, including a vomiting sequence that reminds us that the film is being released in 3D, feel almost entirely out of place.

Less out of place yet more disappointing are the entirely digital effects. They allow Raimi to make his live action violence approximate cartoons, and in doing so often lose all relationship to reality. While these effects appear in some human on human fights, the worst instance is when Linda kills a boar that refuses to die. The sequence ends with her gouging its eye out and repeatedly stabbing it, but there's no sense of tactility to any of it. When more and more of its blood gushes out onto her, it's hard not to search for the seams (which, credit where it's due, are hard to spot) between the digital spurts and the practical goo that lands on her.

Send Help works as comedy every so often, whether it's because of Raimi's penchant for making violence downright goofy or the stars' charisma, but it's so overlong and stagnant as anything else that the majority of it is just a slog.

The film opens Friday, January 30, only in movie theaters, via 20th Century Studios. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.