Four years after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Sam Raimi returns with the survival bonanza Send Help, a ridiculously stale action thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien as colleagues who end up washed up on an island together after a plane crash. The premise is of the simple but efficient kind, but a lack of character development and direction means that, inevitably, this latest release sinks rather than float.
The opening scenes are somewhat promising – at the very least entertaining – as a ditzy Linda Liddle (McAdams somehow made to look unattractive) bows down to the feet of her new boss Bradley (O’Brien) – her old boss’ son – in an effort to secure the promotion she has been promised all these years. Inevitably, Bradley chooses a far less experienced member of the team, much to Linda’s devastation. When she protests, he is briefly impressed by her guts, and elects for her to come on a business trip to Bangkok with the company’s fellow executives. A plane crash ensues, leaving all passengers for dead bar Linda and Bradley, and it quickly becomes clear that without her, he doesn’t stand a chance as, in addition to being an excellent analyst, she is also an experienced survivalist. With the tables turned and the power balance askew, these two colleagues must do whatever it takes to survive – or, at the very least, survive each other.
The first instances on the island are certainly amusing, montages of Linda building shelter, finding food, carefully catching rainwater. As O’Brien’s infuriating, hateable Bradley gestates on the sand, nursed back to health by her, it’s a brilliantly satisfying revenge plot as the role of alpha switches. It becomes clear that while Bradley wishes to attract attention, Linda does not necessarily want to be saved – she is perfectly happy living in nature, and slowly easing him into a position of inferiority. It’s hard not to see hints of Madagascar here, in which Alex the Lion creates the words “HELP” out of bamboo – with the P humorously falling apart to spell out “HELL” – while Marty the Zebra builds a full-on cocktail bar on the other side of the beach. In Send Help however, content seems to run almost completely dry after this initial plot point. While it’s a joy to watch Linda get her own back at Bradley, there are too many backs and forths, miniature subplots that make this feel redundant and tired. Tensions, and strangely, attractions, rise, as McAdams in the wild is so much more darn attractive than wearing an ugly skirt in an office, and without his golf balls, O’Brien isn’t nearly as offensive. Raimi is known for the cheap and camp, but in Send Help, gore and shock are used carelessly – there’s a terrible scene in which Linda slaughters a wild boar, a grotesque medley of gore, snot and screaming on both sides, and another that has been doing the rounds on social media which I found to be slightly ridiculous. It is unfortunate, too, that the semi-big reveal is somewhat spoiled within the first twenty minutes on the island, as though a scene was somehow forgotten and thus not edited out. All in all, this isn’t Raimi’s best, and despite director, actors, and premise aligning on paper, there is very little to rescue here.
