The opening minutes of Send Help are so familiar – so omnipresent in the cinema of the last two decades (whenever computers and cube farms became the norm of middle management professionals) – that they blur into a mass of Office Space-isms. There’s even a bit of Jawbreaker at play here, in which frumpy savant-with-a-funny-name Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams, pulling off the unkempt librarian look quite well) is passed over by newly-installed CEO Bro Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) for a promotion that is rightfully hers. Out the gate, Sam Raimi – master of splattery-cartoonish-horror-zaniness – applies his bizarre camera moves (a funny yet empty gag has the CEO Bro making his direct report (Dennis Haysbert) smell a creamy substance that’s dripped onto his hand), and we almost get the feeling we’re back in the same territory as his previous genre triumph, Drag Me to Hell.
But it all unravels rather quickly, as Linda tags along on a business trip to Bangkok to show off her mad accounting skillz, only to be outed by the douchey CEO Bro and his posse as a hopeful contestant for the TV show Survivor.
To quote Special Agent Dale Cooper:
When was the last time Survivor was considered a relevant component of the pop-culture conversation? Maybe I’m the one missing out, as a quick Google search tells me it’s in its 49th season. Jesus!
But this bit of may-as-well-be-Coca Cola product placement leaves a sour taste from the outset, since it basically defines Linda’s character for the duration of this needlessly long (113 minutes!) and dissatisfying exercise in survival horror. That said, the horror elements come off as more gratuitous – a CG boar getting gored in graphic detail – than purposeful. Raimi seems at uncomfortable odds with the screwball anti-romcom elements, the thriller components, and sneaking in nods to the horror he’s known for, to the point where the gory punctuation marks (popped eyeballs, slashed sides, bitten flesh) seem awkward and out of place.
In any case, the private jet carrying Linda and CEO Bro to Bangkok crashes into the ocean, leaving them both washed ashore in what appears to be a tropical paradise. Despite their burbling animosities, Linda tends to CEO Bro’s incapacitating leg wound. Empty hostilities about “who’s the boss of who” are intercut with Linda consistently besting CEO Bro’s efforts at survival. With Raimi’s penchant for the cartoonish, none of this stirs up much dramatic tension; it’s clearly designed for yuks. And once this becomes an established pattern, the yuks start to diminish.
Therein lies a gaping chasm of a problem with Send Help – whose title becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: neither Linda nor CEO Bro are anything more than the sum of their one-note traits, leading to a repetitive, time-killing structure where moments of revelation come off as disingenuous “whattatwist” rubbish that carries no narrative or dramatic weight. This type of two-person chamber piece all but demands a storytelling tightness that is not forthcoming in Damian Shannon and Mark Swift’s screenplay, which is more content to take a clunky, vignette-based approach to the plot, stumbling onto a third-act revelation that lands with an eyeroll instead of a gasp.
Raimi has proved himself an extremely skilled craftsman over the years, and is capable of milking a dramatic premise for all it’s worth (A Simple Plan is brilliant), but his directorial prowess is contingent on the quality of his scripts, and Send Help is one of the weakest he’s inexplicably hitched his talents to. While watching, I found myself nostalgic for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness – even though it’s a more compressed and compromised exhibition of his talents, at least the imprint of that zany madman remains intact.
2 out of 5 stars
Jonny Numb 
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