Send Help

Rachel McAdams

Sam Raimi's Send Help is genuinely exciting cinema, his best film since Spider-Man 2. As usual, the pulpiness of Raimi's style has led him to be underrated; as Hitchcock was in his day. Yet, history will show that Raimi is just as expert a craftsman as Hitch with an equally mordant sense of humor. Raimi, however, is devoid of Catholic guilt. The screenplay, by the team of Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, swiftly engineers a battle of the sexes on an uncharted desert isle. The combatants are office mouse Linda Little (Rachel McAdams) and her odious nepo baby boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). Linda is a hardworking grinder, who talks to her pet bird and eats tuna fish salad sandwiches at her desk. Raimi has frumped up Ms. McAdams as much as one can and dressed her in tones of beige to make her as dorky and unappealing as possible. Bradley doesn't prefer the image she projects and passes Linda over for a long overdue promotion. She objects and her moxie gets her a ride on the corporate jet to Thailand where Bradley plans to jettison her.

Of course, the tables are turned after Raimi provides us with one of the most hair raising plane crashes in cinematic history. The duo are stranded on a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. Bradley has an injured leg and is as helpless as a baby, a whiny and entitled one at that. The casting, McAdams is a decade older than O'Brien, plays up his lack of maturity. Linda, a Survivor fan, is in her element. She thrives in this environment where survival is a true battle of the fittest and Daddy's riches can't bail one out. Bradley becomes a mouth to feed in a film in which the central motif is what is going into and out of people's mouths. The level of gore and effluvia is high. Raimi really emptied his amniotic sac on this one. That the film champions women as the stronger and more resilient sex should be no surprise to fans of the director who has broached feminist themes since Xena. 

I admired Dylan O'Brien's performance as Dan Ackroyd in Saturday Night and he does equally good work here in tamping down his natural charisma to play a spoiled and aging adolescent. Bradley is never able to countenance that Linda could be an equal partner and that helps bring about his downfall. Thus, McAdams has the plum role and she delivers a gutsy and memorable performance. Raimi has said that he felt he under utilized McAdams talents in Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, but this role makes up for that neglect. I have been a big fan of the actress since I first spied her on the wonderful first season of Slings and Arrows and am glad she gets to strut her stuff in a good genre film as she did in Wes Craven's Red Eye. You don't get an Oscar for appearing in pulp horror that open in February, but McAdams has already racked up enough great performances for a lifetime achievement award in, let's hope, forty years.