Here’s a fun experiment you can try the next time you’re talking to a friend who only sort of knows movies: try to convince them there are multiple directors named Sam Raimi. The first Sam Raimi is, of course, the cult horror director of such scrappy, hyperkinetic genre pictures as the Evil Dead trilogy and Darkman, which have inspired generations of movie punks and gorehounds to mount their own DIY karo-syrup epics. The second is the wiz-kid director of populist blockbusters, whose Spider-Man trilogy of the early 2000s heralded the continuing superhero boom. (There was a third Sam Raimi— the one who directed such midbudget, grown-up studio films as A Simple Plan and For Love of the Game— but we haven’t heard much from him since Hollywood stopped making those). Understandably, it is the second Raimi who finds steadier work, popping in periodically for such bottom-line-friendly franchise fare as Oz the Great and Powerful and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. But when film buffs speak of Sam Raimi in hushed tones, they’re usually referring to the director’s first incarnation, who has been largely MIA since his 2009 return to form Drag Me to Hell.
If you were to go into Raimi’s newest film, Send Help, without seeing any ads or hearing any word of mouth, you might initially figure it for the work of the second Raimi. It is, after all, a glossy adventure comedy starring two famous and photogenic movie stars. But make no mistake: this is Raimi at his most joyously nasty, a blackly comic morality play owing more to EC Comics than Marvel.
Fellow Multiverse refugee Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, a mousy office drone for a high-powered consulting firm. Linda’s one of those workhorses you can find in any office, the one who blends into the background while quietly holding the entire company together; her social life consists largely of watching Survivor reruns with her beloved pet cockatiel. Linda’s work ethic was certainly not lost on her late CEO, who more or less promised her a VP position before his passing. Unfortunately, the boss’s son and newly minted company president, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), has already earmarked the position for one of his frat buddies, and anyway can’t be bothered with a female employee he has no interest in exploiting sexually. Still, Linda knows the business, so Bradley invites her on a business trip to Bangkok to extract any knowledge he needs before shipping her to an office far, far away.
Only they never make it to Bangkok. Somewhere over the Pacific, the company jet hits some turbulence and goes down in flames. Naturally, the only survivors to wash ashore on an uncharted desert isle are Linda and Bradley. Bradley is immobilized with a leg wound (and probably wouldn’t have lasted too long even if he was fully mobile), but Linda instantly takes to island life, drawing in equal measure from her business resourcefulness and her Survivor obsession to become an instant Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. As Linda nurses Bradley back to health they form an uneasy truce— yet neither can ever quite be sure whether to trust the other.
It’s easy to imagine a version of Send Help which pulls its punches; you could take the same premise and the same leads and turn out a reasonably diverting rom-com, the handsome boss and deceptively beautiful subordinate finding love in a tropical paradise. But any doubt that this is vintage Raimi is erased during the hysterically violent crash sequence, in which Bradley’s fratty compatriots each meet gleefully nasty ends. Raimi resists the temptation to soft-pedal his characters; Bradley is, and remains, a total dick, and Linda is plainly more than a little crazy even before she starts gutting fish with her bare hands. This sort of unapologetically black comedy is increasingly rare in the Hollywood vogue for aw-shucks comedies in which no character is allowed to be irredeemable. Send Help feels like a corrective to the endless Office binges which have tricked a generation into thinking there’s anything “cozy” about mindnumbing white-collar drudgery.
A two-hander like this lives and dies on the strength of the casting of its two hands, and thankfully Send Help succeeds on both counts. O’Brien is a suitably hapless heir to longtime Raimi muse Bruce Campbell, ably carrying on the Evil Dead star’s mix of deliberately obnoxious machismo and ragdoll physical comedy (Campbell cameos in oil painting form as the late elder Preston, making this comic lineage explicit). But just as Linda asserts herself as queen of her island, this is McAdams’ show through and through. McAdams is a brilliant comic actress, but, like Raimi, her talent for outrageous material is often sidelined by her equal facility for more mainstream fare. Here, McAdams is given license to pull out all the stops and deliver a purely comic performance, and she is a joy to watch; even in scenes where she’s merely listening to Bradley talk, most of the laughs come from her silent reactions. If Send Help attracts the cult following it deserves, I have a feeling Linda Liddle will remain with us for a very long time.
All that being said, Send Help doesn’t quite reach the giddy highs of Raimi’s finest. For reasons unclear, the film is padded out to nearly two hours, occasionally sagging where it ought to sprint. This languid running time allows the audience too much time to consider the implausibility of the film’s premise, and, worse, to game out its surprises in advance; I pegged a major twist around the halfway mark, which wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t a full hour left in the movie. Nutty material like this is best delivered fast and furious; we shouldn’t feel like we’re stuck on the island itself.
Still, it’s hard to fault an original studio comedy this gleefully unrestrained, especially when it arrives smack dab in the middle of the January-February doldrums. Like Ryan Coogler in last year’s Sinners, we can sense Raimi’s joy in being freed from the franchise machine, allowed to indulge in the sort of snotty, puerile “splatstick” comedy on which he made his name (there are two scenes in particular, a phantasmagorical dream sequence and an outrageously messy encounter with a feral boar, which would be right at home in an Evil Dead flick). When Sam Raimi is on his game, there are few filmmakers who can match the bonkers energy, and in spite of Send Help’s flaws I found myself grinning with just as much adolescent bliss as when I first unspooled Evil Dead II on VHS in high school. First Raimi is back. Hail to the king, baby.
Send Help
2026
dir. Sam Raimi
114 min.
Opens Friday, 1/30 @ Kendall Square Cinema, Apple Cinemas Cambridge, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all local AMCs
