Fantasy island: "Send Help"

See, 2026 isn't all bad news: we got a new Sam Raimi film - his first standalone since 2009's Drag Me To Hell - and it even briefly topped the box office while the rest of us were glued to the Winter Olympics. Send Help proceeds from a script by two men (Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, past crimes: Freddy vs. Jason, the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th, the Baywatch movie) which suggests a post-#MeToo rewrite of Nicolas Roeg's Castaway: it describes the circumstances whereby an entitled corporate asshat (Dylan O'Brien) ends up stranded on a desert island in the Gulf of Thailand with one of his lowlier employees, a workaholic numbers whizz (Rachel McAdams) possessed of the comic-book name Linda Liddle and the limpest bangs ever dangled on screen. This being Raimi, they've not been put there for sunkissed romance, rather a knockdown drag-out battle of the sexes, fought to the death. It does, however, involve a makeover. In this new environment - a sandy leveller - the previously meek, downtrodden and generally overlooked Linda can reap the benefits of the many lonely nights in she's spent bingeing Survivor with her pet parakeet; she is, inevitably, better suited to this scenario than her feckless, whiny, incapacitated alpha dog of a boss. One of Send Help's more obvious flaws is that it wildly overrates what reality TV teaches us on a nightly or weekly basis, but then - as a 20th Century Fox production - it too emerges from the entertainment-industrial complex.

Mostly, we're watching a creative heading back to basics after surviving the indifferent multiverse chicanery of 2022's Doctor Strange sequel: this is two characters, one location, a self-contained narrative worked through with a smaller budget than you get - with hand-tying caveats - on an MCU movie. (You can even imagine it being done in less exotic climes with a smaller budget still.) That story is simple enough for a director to feel as if he can impose himself upon it: here extreme close-ups that exaggerate first Linda's dorkiness, then her boss's helplessness, there buckets of blood, projectile vomiting and maggot-eyed zombie nightmares, towards the end a neat match cut that at least suggests Raimi is having a measure of fun making movies again. I will concede it all still feels fairly superficial, one of those 15-rated items that spiritually feels more 12A (adolescent, perhaps) than it does 18 (or adult). Raimi can open his box of tricks and apply lipstick to this wiggly pig of a script, but he can't really dress it up with themes, ideas or anything else much. However hot and steamy the weather, whatever desperation or isolation these characters are feeling, sex - to name one possibility - doesn't enter the picture: Linda briefly cops an apparently appreciative eyeful of the O'Brien derriere, bringing on a thunderous storm, and the next minute she's threatening to chop off this dude's goolies. (The transitions between these scenes don't make a lot of sense, but they may unintentionally reflect Hollywood's muddled thinking in the matter of male-female relations, with newly empowered women running up against male creatives' longer-standing castration complexes.)

For much of its 113 minutes, Send Help seems happy enough to remain at or around the level of a live-action cartoon, which is why the conspicuously shoddy CGI (a crashing plane, a charging boar) didn't bother me unduly: if it's some considerable way down on the practical VFX Raimi engineered on his breakthrough Evil Dead films forty years ago - and reads as the groggiest of visual hangovers from the director's time in the Marvelverse - it's broadly of a piece with everything else around it. These antagonists aren't a real, flesh-and-blood couple; they're either abstract ideas of man and woman, almost certainly the result of writers spending too much time on social media, or mere characters in a movie. (Call them "Man" and "Woman": Raimi should have rented out Emerald Fennell's quotation marks for the opening weekend.) She's the kind of sleeves-rolled-up adventuress your agent advises you to play after your big Oscar shot playing a homemaking sweetheart comes to naught (Linda's hair bounces back to life on the island, which is almost as much a relief for us as it must have been for McAdams); he's the kind of asshole you sign up to play in a film by a name director that will get you into the multiplexes; and as Send Help approaches the ninety-minute mark, both run into a plot development that makes you think "ah, this must be the third act now" rather than "gosh, this is exactly how all this would play out in the real world". A throwaway sketch rather than a fully committed picture, from a filmmaker himself found swimming back to the mainland from choppy waters: semi-enjoyable, but minor Raimi, and finally all a bit too cynical for this viewer's liking.

Send Help is now playing in selected cinemas.