Three years ago, a movie called “Triangle of Sadness” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In that vicious social satire from “The Square” director Ruben Östlund, a cruise ship full of insufferably self-absorbed passengers ranging from oligarchs to influencers sinks within swimming distance of a tropical island. Incapable of basic survival skills — such as hunting, fishing and making shelter — the hapless elites turn to the help (i.e., a glorified janitor) to save them. This far removed from civilization, however, the balance of power flips, and the resourceful housekeeper takes control.
Sam Raimi’s “Send Help” follows a very similar trajectory, giving the “Evil Dead” director a chance to flex some of the gonzo energy that fueled his over-the-top early work as well as post-“Spider-Man” palate cleanser “Drag Me to Hell.” Unfortunately, since the project has been kicking around for more than six years, one can only imagine the sinking feeling he and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift experienced when “Triangle of Sadness” got there first (right down to the ending).
In Raimi’s movie, homely but brilliant corporate number cruncher Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) gets passed over for a promotion by her douchebag boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). Semi-aware of her skill set, he invites her along for a far-flung business trip. Somewhere along the way, the private jet goes down and everybody dies — in excessively painful ways, as Raimi gleefully shows them being sucked out of the plane and strangled by their own neckties — except for Linda and Bradley.
These two wash up on an uninhabited island, and you can guess the rest. Or maybe you can’t.
What’s so much fun about “Send Help,” beyond its twisted B-movie premise and refreshing disinterest in anything more highfalutin than handing Linda a chance to turn the tables, is how unpredictable it manages to be for most of their time on the island (except for that darn ending). That been-here-before weakness aside, the movie will appeal to a different crowd from the one that rushes out to see Palme d’Or winners. We’re talking folks who’ll recognize a little bit of themselves in Linda, who’s all but decided to tender her resignation when the plane goes down.
The role calls for an unexpected stretch from McAdams, the ex-“mean girl” who’s required to play dowdy here, showing up at work in dull gray clothes, unruly hair and clodhoppers, all of which give the character a frumpy feel. Asking McAdams to embody the moth-like Linda ranks up there with casting Michelle Pfeiffer as the mousy, confidence-starved Selina Kyle (before her transformation into Catwoman) in “Batman Returns”: Nobody’s convinced she’s that hopeless, and yet, it makes her transformation under extreme conditions all the more dramatic — a trick of exaggerated grimaces and unflattering angles, as Raimi playfully emphasizes the prominent mole on McAdams’ left cheek, where other directors went out of their way to hide the beauty mark.
In last year’s “Twinless,” O’Brien delivered the kind of (double) performance that makes people seriously reevaluate what an actor is capable of, and his Bradley is as different from that film’s identical twins as those two characters were from one another. Here, he plays it smug, entitled and totally tactless, telling Linda to her face that he sees “no value” in her. Of course, Bradley finds himself singing a new tune after he comes to in the middle of nowhere, with no one but Linda to boss around.
“We’re not in the office anymore,” replies his disgruntled employee (who too-conveniently auditioned to compete on “Survivor”), setting up the same role reversal we saw in “Triangle of Sadness.” Raimi shows an even higher threshold for gross-out humor — no small feat, considering Östlund’s epic seasickness sequence. Clearly looking to shock, Raimi depicts bodily injury in oozing detail, whether that means thrusting the camera into Bradley’s festering leg wound or watching one of the pair plunge their thumb into the eye socket of the other. The director wants to get a rise out of audiences, and he knows precisely which buttons to push, smashing teeth and ripping hair out by the roots.
Instead of falling for each other, the way they might have in a 20th-century studio movie (“Romancing the Stone” and “Six Days, Seven Nights” come to mind), this 20th Century Studios movie finds the two overstressed co-workers feigning civility before things escalate into a far-fetched war. Essentially stripping all that’s “logical” from the psychological thriller genre, Raimi doesn’t seem especially concerned with plausible human behavior, preferring to keep audiences guessing as the characters’ motivations keep changing. Linda appears to like this new arrangement, hoping they will remain stranded for as long as possible, whereas Bradley sorely misses his fiancée (Edyll Ismail), who drops in via dream sequence.
The lousy boss spends most of the movie laid up on the beach, petulantly accusing Linda of playing “Suzie Homemaker,” when she’s the one out hunting for dinner. The character who gets the worse end of the stick here is a wild boar, whose gruesome cameo would be a lot more satisfying if it weren’t so obviously computer generated. Once the master of extreme practical effects (with then-accomplice Tom Sullivan), Raimi now relies far too heavily on digital tools — and that’s one thing that has no business on a desert island, where everything from fire to fresh water must be cultivated by hand.
