Cue the French horns, didgeridoos, dramatic percussion, and ethereal wordless chanting. Her name is Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), and she has made a tryout tape for the show Survivor (2000). Linda works for a wealth investment company in strategy and planning (and not accounting), and is aboard a plane with the CEOs who have been dealt the hand of nepotism. They’ve found her tryout video and are mocking her on the flight. Linda is a major Survivor nerd just waiting for the chance to prove her self-sufficiency. Then her moment comes. The plane hits turbulence over Thailand and crash lands in the Andaman sea, a channel of the Indian Ocean containing remote islands, heavy monsoon weather, treacherous terrain, and wild boars — (but if feral pigs arrived here, what does that imply about who else has been here?) What do you say, Jeff Probst, does Linda have what it takes, her video asks, and the rest of the movie spends its runtime answering that question.
The only survivors of the crash are Linda from strategy and planing (again, not accounting!) and Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien (her rude boss who inherited the company from his father)). It’s time for Linda’s power play — Bradley’s leg is injured in the crash, rendering him helpless and rendering her the de facto Boss of the Island. Can they learn to trust one another in this two-hander Lord of the Flies scenario, and should we, as the audience, trust either of them?
The answer to both questions is no. Sam Raimi’s Send Help (no really, he directs, the possessive means something), plays fast and loose with its island-bound premise, and has a lot of fun with its first two acts until it draws to its silly, predictable dénouement — not like Cast Away (2000), where there is a metaphorical fork in the road, but more like broad satire, where the survivor(s, (no spoilers)), reveal that the necessity of survival is a commentary on the will to overcome broken systems.
When Sam Raimi is making a bottled up movie version of the popular CBS show Survivor, the famed director of The Evil Dead (1981) leans into genre. There are brief moments of horror — like jump-scares, spurts of blood, direct threats and action — that keep the movie moving. That Cast Away landed alongside the first season of Survivor and Send Help lands on its 50th Season, speaks to something circular in the cultural — interests in universal themes, owning the means of production, and what it means to gather resources against a system that’s breaking wide open right in front of us.
A film of the two halves, Send Help, in its first half, is a fun exploration of these ideas, which finds itself a bit stranded and unsure of where to take those concepts by the ending. This is why it’s good, common screenwriting advice to start from the ending, so the rest of the story can front-load the payoffs, so they’re more satisfying and make more sense, as a cohesive story.
Eventually, we get to the movie’s conclusion, and wish that it kept the same energy from its excellent and fun middle sections. Yet, as early-year releases go, this is a fun genre programmer with a slight satirical bent that could either have been leaned into or away from for a better total outcome. This said, Sam Raimi going back to the well for a more original story is valid and so welcome — Tribal Council has decided — we’re all happy to have him staying on that island.