Review by Tim Robins
Send Help is an entertaining drama/comedy that stars Rachel (Mean Girls) McAdams and Dylan (Maze Runner) O’Brien, as two corporate climbers stranded on a tropical island when the company’s private jet crashes, leaving them the only survivors.
No love is lost between the pair. McAdams plays Linda Liddle, an ambitious employee who has been waiting seven years for a promised promotion to the company board. But that was under old management. O’Brien is Bradley Preston, the new CEO who just wants Liddle out of the way so he can surround himself with Mar-a-largo-faced women and golf buddies.
It seems Preston holds all the cards, but the tables are turned once on the island, particularly because Liddle has been training to appear on the real-life, American reality show Survivor. Liddle’s talent for building shelters, collecting rainwater and hunting wildlife gives her a potentially lethal edge.
The script by Daimion Shannon and Mark Swift wittily plays the scenario as an anti-romantic comedy in which laughs come from relief, as the stranded survivors manipulate and come close to killing each other. Certainly, you’ll need a dark sense of humour to find any of this funny.
Ideal material then for director Sam Raimi, whose movies, including The Evil Dead, and first Spider-Man trilogy have demonstrated his talent for ever-escalating character conflict and an eye for grotesque slapstick in which horror and humour are delivered together through on-the-nose editing and bringing the gore up close.
Raimi’s films are often living cartoons. This allows him to get away with audacious moments including, here, a spectacular boar gore set piece, and a lot of casual unpleasantness. The disadvantage is that a lot of the twists are sign-posted well in advance.
And not for one minute do we think Liddle and Preston have reconciled their differences in the face of adversity.
McAdams’ performance is wonderful. She really sells us the idea that a corporate employee with a love for tuna sandwiches can also go spear-fishing when the need arises. O’Brien is not remotely sympathetic. We laugh at him every time Liddel leaves his character to fail – after all, turnabout is fair play. During the ill-fated flight to Bangkok, we see Preston and his buddies raucously laughing at Liddle’s audition tape for Survivor, while she looks helplessly on.
The island setting provides a welcome colour palette of blue seas, verdant green jungles and sandy beaches. It hardly matters that the island’s implausible geology has been designed for danger and plot reveals.
Before the end, Raimi finds time to deliver a couple of nods to Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest and The Birds. He also has McAdams look defiantly out at the audience on several occasions. She may be in control on the island, but Raimi is in control of what we see. Tension comes precisely from the fact we aren’t in control. What will be, will be. The film is excruciating in this respect.
Having worked in an organisation and been deliberately passed over for promotion, I found the whole office set up wincingly believable and tough going to watch. Raimi’s deft direction is incredibly economical, selecting just the moments that are needed to make us root for Liddle, even when she is revealed to have a heart of darkness.
Send help? No chance. I was left helpless with laughter.
Tim Robins
Send Help is in cinemas now
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
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