An Office Worker's Fantasy Brought to Life

"Sam Raimi is one of Hollywood's finest purveyors of junk. I say this with love and reverence, and with full acknowledgment that he's the man behind such masterpieces as Evil Dead II and A Simple Plan. But the director has spent decades digging for gold amid pulpier genres, turning out oddball horror, thriller, and comic-book movies. As his career went on, Raimi graduated to making blockbuster versions of junk, including the first Spider-Man trilogy and, most recently, a Doctor Strange sequel for Marvel."

"All credit to Raimi-he's still able to deliver on a smaller scale, which his contemporaries (such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Zemeckis) might now struggle to do. Send Help is breathtakingly unpretentious, a campfire tale that swirls a CEO's nightmare with the fantasy of every bedraggled, overworked office drone: What if a plane crash stranded an evil boss in the jungle with a meek but capable subordinate, and their roles began to reverse?"

"Read: A horror movie about befriending the rich and powerful Send Help reduces that premise further by focusing on a party of two. Bradley Preston (played by Dylan O'Brien) is a preening nepo baby in charge of a multinational corporation, and Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a harried member of the planning-and-strategy department whom he just passed over for promotion. Bradley is largely concerned with perfecting his golf game; Linda spends her off hours obsessing over the TV show Survivor."

Sam Raimi built a career mining pulpier genres and blockbuster adaptations yet returns to compact, unpretentious horror-comedy with Send Help. The film delivers spirited, violent silliness and distills satirical takes on capitalist hierarchy into a two-person survival premise. Bradley Preston is a preening nepo baby CEO fixated on perfecting his golf game. Linda Liddle is a harried planning-and-strategy employee recently passed over for promotion who obsessively watches Survivor. After Bradley invites Linda on a work trip, their private jet crashes in the Gulf of Thailand, stranding them in the jungle and setting up a reversal of power between boss and subordinate.

Read at The Atlantic