I like Sam Raimi’s verve as a genre movie director. He demonstrates it in Send Help with the same enthusiasm for wild action and racing camera shots and gross jump scares and hilarious close-ups of characters at dire points in their lives that he once brought to The Evil Dead, the indie horror film that made him famous back in 1981.
Send Help is a nicely stripped-down, dark comic action-adventure thriller that suits Raimi to a T. It’s about a fortysomething downtrodden oddball misfit named Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) who lives alone with a pet cockatiel with whom she shares wine-drinking evenings watching Survivor, plus nightly snacks and long conversations. She works at a corporation where she’s long overdue for a promotion. But the company founder who promised her a position as vice president, based on her hard work and savant-like skills with numbers, has recently died, and his pampered douchebag son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) has taken over as CEO.
Bradley takes one gaping look at Linda, with her stringy hair and baggy sweaters and sensible shoes and bits of tuna fish from her lunchtime sandwich eaten at her desk still sticking to her chin, and mentally consigns her to oblivion, career-wise. She’s physically repulsive to him and therefore of no use to the company in his horndog view, despite all her skills and experience and dedication. But how to get rid of her efficiently? How about if he takes her along with his team on a business trip to Bangkok and finds so many ways to humiliate her, he sabotages her last chance to prove she’s worthy of keeping her job at all, much less get promoted?
But before we can begin to settle into that plotline, there’s a catastrophic plane crash into the ocean. The only survivors who wash up onto a remote island somewhere off the coast of Thailand are Linda and Bradley. He’s unconscious and has a nasty leg injury, and while he’s lying helpless, she demonstrates her Survivor-learned skills by…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
