In Review: ‘Send Help,’ ‘Shelter’

Send Help
Dir. Sam Raimi
113 min.

There’s nothing particularly subtle about Send Help, even before the vomit starts to fly and the blood begins to flow. Sam Raimi’s first film since Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the first to feel like a full-on Raimi film since Drag Me to Hell in 2009, Send Help opens with a nightmarish, but not exactly cartoonish, depiction of sexist office politics. Expecting Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) to make good on a promised promotion after he takes over as CEO following the death of his father, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) watches as he gives the job to a frat buddy instead, a lazy co-worker who’s freely taken credit for Linda’s work. Bradley makes no excuses for his decision. That’s just how it is. What can you do? Some glass ceilings crush those beneath them. Also, Linda really needs to stop eating tuna salad sandwiches at her desk. Nobody likes that.

Sometimes, however, those ceilings get shattered by outside forces. Asked to accompany Bradley and other members of the executive boys’ club on a trip to Bangkok, Linda finds her position has changed when she and Bradley emerge as the only survivors of a horrific plane crash that leaves them alone on a desert island with seemingly no hope of rescue. What’s more, Bradley’s injured and immobile. Fortunately, Linda, once an aspiring Survivor contestant, knows how to keep them alive. Unfortunately (for one of them, anyway), Bradley doesn’t seem to understand how the balance of power has shifted and Linda realizes he never will until he’s been put in his place.

Working from a script by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (Baywatch), Raimi turns Send Help into an over-the-top reversal-of-fortune story that’s a bit more complicated than the underdog getting the better of the top dog. As justified as Linda is in her anger, Bradley’s not entirely wrong to find her annoying. (Does anyone like the smell of others’ tuna salad sandwiches?) Their situation unlocks Linda’s hidden gifts but also the part of her that enjoys controlling others. Yet while Send Help allows Raimi to reprise the bleakly hilarious misanthropy of Drag Me to Hell, it’s not like Send Help refuses to take sides. Bradley’s story is one of a jerk who refuses to be humbled or acknowledge the value of others. Linda’s is one of a woman finally allowed to come into her own.

This isn’t always pretty. Raimi’s gift for controlled chaos and kinetic set pieces first surfaces with a plane crash scene in which a shattered cabin doesn’t stop the corporate backstabbing. It soon returns as Linda first learns to bend the island (and some of its most dangerous inhabitants) to her will then applies the same skills to Bradley who, as he recovers, attempts to revert their relationship to his preferred order, the one in which he calls all the shots. Their power struggle sometimes plays like a popcorn variation on Lena Wertmüller’s Swept Away, with bodily fluids taking the place of discussions of left-wing politics, and at other moments like an emotionally fraught, sexually charged variation on a Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd tussle. O’Brien even gives his character a cartoonish cackle, part of a coy performance that keeps suggesting Bradley might learn to see the error of his past ways if given enough time. He’s fun, but McAdams is the real show here, playing Lisa as a mouse who becomes a lion as she adapts to an environment that allows her to be herself at last. It’s a place where ceilings, glass or otherwise, don’t matter anymore and seawater can wash away the past—and a lot of other stains, too. —Keith Phipps

Send Help crash lands in theaters everywhere tonight. And don't miss The Reveal's ranking of every film Sam Raimi has ever directed.

Shelter
Dir: Ric Roman Waugh
107 min.

When asked in 1984 about the difference between Robert De Niro, who he’d worked with on Once Upon a Time in America, and Clint Eastwood, who he’d worked with on the “Dollars Trilogy,” director Sergio Leone referred to De Niro as an actor and Eastwood as a star. “Robert De Niro throws him­self into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with ele­gance,” said Leone, “while Clint Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang. It’s exactly that lowered visor which composes his character.” 

Jason Statham is an Eastwood type, a snarling old-school tough guy whose good movies and bad movies are entirely context-dependent. Statham will be Statham, whether he’s the straight man in Spy, the stolid center of cartoonish action vehicles like The Beekeeper or The Transporter, or more simply a battering ram that plows through some generic flotsam like his new film, Shelter. But the opening reel of Shelter hints at what Statham might have been like in a Leone or a Jean-Pierre Melville movie, which would take more an existential interest in his life as an ex-mercenary turned full-time loner. Hiding out in permanent exile on a rocky, otherwise uninhabited Scottish island, Mason (Statham) lives with his trusty dog-with-no-name and the only human he ever sees is an adolescent girl who leaves supplies (dog food, porridge, vodka) outside his door. He doesn’t have a TV or a computer. He doesn’t read. Playing chess against himself is the only habit of his that could be considered “colorful.” 

This isn’t a permanent state of affairs, of course, and director Ric Roman Waugh, who specializes in forgettable action vehicles that will get you a great score on Cinematrix (Val Kilmer in Felon, Dwayne Johnson in Snitch, Gerard Butler in Angel Has Fallen, etc.), doesn’t care to dwell on Mason’s everyday life longer than necessary. While these early scenes in Shelter are by far the most compelling part of the film, they suggest the work of a filmmaker who loves The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but watched most of it looking up from his phone. Nonetheless, there’s an absence of psychology to Mason’s introduction that’s well-tailored to Statham, and it’s a shame that Waugh then proceeds to put him through the usual paces. 

The girl who drops off Mason’s supplies is the one who inadvertently coaxes him out of his shell. After a nasty storm kills her uncle and leaves her caught in a net off shore, Jesse (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) is rescued by Mason. But taking care of this wounded orphan blows his cover. When he risks a trip to shore to get medical supplies to treat her ankle wound, CCTV cameras pick up on Mason’s face and send agents at MI6 into high alert. It’s not worth spoiling why he’s a wanted man—that he’s the greatest weapon ever forged by the state is a given here—but he has to flee assassins while trying to find an exit ramp where Jesse can lead some kind of normal life. 

The bond between Jesse and Mason is the stock emotional component of Shelter, and Statham and Breathnach have decent chemistry together as two survivors and loners who naturally develop a father-daughter surrogacy. Statham’s lips even curl into a half-smile at one point. But once Waugh brings the pair out into the open, the film devolves into generic shootouts at tried-and-true locations, from a British farmhouse hideaway to a crowded nightclub where the hippest young people in the city are collateral damage. To want Statham to appear like he cares about any of it is to ask too much. —Scott Tobias

Shelter opens nationally tonight.