Send Help

Send help is a phrase colloquially associated with castaways, or movie castaways, at least, but in Sam Raimi’s horror-comedy “Send Help,” the phrase may as well be stamped on the forehead of his hilarious, hapless, resourceful, unexpectedly complicated anti-hero Linda Liddell (Rachel McAdams). Perpetually unkempt and smelling of tuna, Linda is the office pariah even if she doubles as its dynamo, working overtime to compose a report for the frat brother (Xavier Samuel) of her new CEO, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who subsequently gets the promotion that she had been promised. The opening 20 minutes is fast-paced and flashy, but it is also oddly predictable. When we see Linda at home talking to someone, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that when the camera finishes pulling back, it will reveal that she’s been talking to her pet. That this extended opening works so well anyway is a testament to McAdams creating a character out of what could have become a caricature by brilliantly jibing with Raimi’s frenetic aesthetic to evince the air of someone so awkward and oblivious that she can’t help but step on social rakes over and over with a well-meaning smile on her face. Even if I always knew the cringe that was coming, McAdams made it so that I could hardly stand to look. Truly, it’s easier to watch her repeatedly projectile vomit on someone’s face than unwittingly talk to someone with tuna on her chin.

Linda does not so much find the wherewithal to confront Brantley about being passed over as she does suffer something like a temporary bout of insanity, marching into his office in lieu of breaking down. He does not recant his decision but instead invites her on his private plane to a meeting in Thailand to prove herself. Little does he know! Aboard the plane, however, the other executives make fun of her behind her back by watching her Survivor audition tape, apparently angering the gods so much that the plane’s engine fails and sends them hurtling into the sea, a sort of diabolical version of a corporate retreat challenge in which seeing what everyone is made of mixes with showing their true colors, and turns out, Linda is made of the stiffest stuff. It also foreshadows how nimbly Raimi turns blood and gore into unexpected personal growth. Only Linda and Bradley survive, washing up on a seemingly deserted island, though at first the latter is infirm due to a nasty gash on his leg, foreshadowing a shift in the balance of power.

I am reluctant to delve too deep into spoilers. It’s not that “Send Help” becomes less predictable, per see, but that it deviously remixes deserted island cliches and wields them in an order you are not necessarily always anticipating. It also ditches any sense of practical realism, speeding through all bits and bobs that it took Tom Hanks’s character forever to sort out in “Cast Away,” for an effective emotional realism that essentially recasts their setting as a beachside boardroom. Honestly, at times “Send Help” evokes an R-rated “Gilligan’s Island,” like the makeshift desk that Linda fashions out of sticks to manifest the undergoing power shift between she and her boss. If it’s clear that Raimi sides with Linda in the emergent struggle for control, it’s just as true that writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift infuse her with contradictory traits that pleasingly muddy our attachment to her, adding dimension that gives “Send Help” some real juice. It carries that juice all the way through a conclusion that is literally ambiguous but figuratively clear as day, stretching the corporate retreat as horror movie allegory as far as it will go. She has visualized success.  

Game Night

A long time ago, in a Hollywood far, far away, when John McClane, in “Die Hard”, needing an alias to protect his identity in the moment, called himself “Roy Rogers”, it was a designation born of the character’s own pithiness more than any kind of wink-wink at the audience. That’s because “Die Hard” did a stellar job of world-building and then making that world feel lived in, so that you could imagine McClane watching Roy Rogers on TV as a boy. Late in “Game Night”, however, when Max Davis (Jason Bateman) references “Taken 3” at a crucial moment, you don’t believe that he’s a “Taken” fan, or even that he caught “Taken 3” on the red-eye from L.A. to Newark, so much as a character in an action movie simulation, plugging into a pre-existing action movie to help him advance to the next level. By the time “Game Night” concluded, except that it might not really have, I felt like that dude at the end of “eXistenZ” (1999). “Hey, tell me the truth,” I wanted to say, “are we still in the game?”

The game in “Game Night” is a murder mystery party in which the mystery becomes real and the potential of murder genuine. This is connected to Brooks (Kyle Chandler), Max’s faux-charismatic brother, host of the murder mystery party, not necessarily being on the up and up. Max and his wife Annie (Rachel McAdams), as well as the other quartet of game night participants, gradually unravel that the ersatz is authentic leading to a desperate search and rescue mission. No matter how real the situation gets, however, the movie never takes it completely seriously, diffusing every macabre turn with a pop culture reference. A lot of movies play that sort of inside baseball just to earn cheap laughs, but “Game Night” makes these references the point, nearly every allusion to a celebrity or a movie sort of existing as the key to unlocking the jam in which they find themselves, ironical video game cheat codes.

It sounds like a simple send-up of summer entertainment, and it sort of is, but also, to directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s credit, many of “Game Night’s” action sequences forgo the scourge of shaky cam. Granted, neither a mid-movie car chase nor a later foot chase, of sorts, involving a fabergé egg exactly re-invent the action movie wheel, but they nevertheless pop on account of their visual clarity. You can see stuff! On the other hand, the movie’s attempts at actual drama are far less edifying.

Darkness worth exploring lurks in “Game Night”, glimpsed in the counterpoint of Cliff Martinez’s synth score over an aerial shot of sprawling suburban tract and in the comically moody performance of Jessie Plemmons. As a cop living next door to the Davis’s who is obsessed with an ex, Plemmons wields a monotone drawl and unblinking eyes to fine effect, intimating a melancholy well beyond the normal parameters. Not that the movie knows what to do with his shifty aura, unfortunately, as the character’s heartbreak ultimately proves emotionally expendable to further the film’s overall What’s Next?! sensation.

“Game Night” strains to make things personal through Max and Annie’s unsuccessful attempts to have a baby, outlined in the prologue, as well as the fellow murder mystery participants’ respective relationship crises. These, however, come across like role-playing game statistics as opposed to anything of actual emotional value. What’s more, Max’s struggles at conceiving with Annie are suggested as being tied to a crisis of confidence in relation to his brother, though in the movie’s language what allows him to finally cross this hurdle is not so much coming to terms with Brooks as getting wild and crazy in his life.

The movie doesn’t seem to know this, and neither, frankly, does Bateman, who does his straight-man comic thing pretty well, as he often does, but never really becomes unwound. Rachel McAdams does, making you wish the movie was a little more about her, a little less about him, but what else is new? She has long excelled at grounding absurdity, as her wonderful, underrated “Red Eye” performance can attest, and in a sequence where she is tasked with excavating a bullet from her beau’s arm, guided by instructions on her smartphone, she comes across both in over her head and getting a kick out it anyway, a delicate balance for which all of “Game Night” strives but cannot always manage.

McAdams, however, is even better before that, in the moments when she thinks nothing is real. It’s something akin to Bill Murray’s “The Man Who Knew Too Little”, but with more of an edge. Indeed, when she is made to quote Rosanna Arquette’s iconic opening commands in “Pulp Fiction”, McAdams does not so much quote the sequence as ineffably get inside its skin. Not long after, as Annie plays Third Eye Blind on the jukebox and dances with a pistol waving near her lips, it is both funny and frightening, someone so deep in the game that, for a second, you’re not sure she’ll ever find her way out. I sort of wish she hadn’t.

Aloha

“Tell me you don’t believe in the sky.” This is what Captain Allison Ng (Emma Stone) demands of her superior, and eventual suitor, a military contractor, Brian Gilchrist (Bradley Cooper), pleading for him to see the atmosphere for the heavens, a place that is the playground of Hawaiian gods rather than the jurisdiction of the SDMC. It may as well be the same demand writer/director Cameron Crowe, the once heralded Oscar winner, now unofficial master of the rom com disaster, but evermore sentimental fool is making of us. Though “Aloha” is filled with real world concerns it nonetheless comes equipped with devout belief in the ineffable magic of the scenic landscape and indigenous culture of the archipelago in the Central Pacific. A young boy, Mitchell (Jaden Lieberher), a character who’s all traits rather than a whole person, a plague emblemizing the entire movie, is in love with Hawaiian myths, and you can tell Crowe is too. You can tell Crowe wanted “Aloha” to be his own Hawaiian myth – “Brian Gilchrist & the Space Rocket.”

Gilchrist is the liaison between the American military stationed on Oahu and an eccentric billionaire, Carson Welch, Bill Murray imagining himself as Richard Branson, who wants to a launch some uber-super-duper doohickey into space. The launch site, however, doubles as a sacred burial ground watched over by a fervent Hawaiian independence activist, Dennis “Bumpy” Kanahele (as himself). Thus, Gilchrist, in tandem with Captain Ng, is dispatched to mediate terms. It’s a storyline completely counteracting the media’s pre-release allegation of no Hawaiians because, in fact, the film is primarily about America’s imperialism run amok over the islands. Well, not primarily; perhaps we should say…partially. And that’s a serious part of the problem.

Dubiously revealed as one-fourth Hawaiian, Ng is like Crowe’s attempt to appease in advance the people upset by a lack of native protagonists. Crowe’s heart is in the right place – I swear it is – but he’s standing smack dab in the middle of the forest, writing about the trees without, somehow, still being able to see them. General Dixon, played by Alec Baldwin, laments near the end “We never should have let civilians into space”, a truly odd takeaway in a film generally stressing free-thinking. You can’t figure out why in the hell there’s not a Bumpy Kanahele line countering it – “We never should have let white people into Hawaii.” The sky is one battle ground, Oahu is the other, yet politically the film keeps to the shallow end. When Gilchrist’s and Ng’s meeting with Kanahele grows terse, it suddenly shifts to a sing-along as Ng acquires an acoustic guitar and strums along like Joan Baez in fatigues. It’s classic Crowe, of course, that unshakable faith in music as a conciliator of all things. But in this case he’s unable to square his prominent earnest perspective with a film whose foremost twist involves a nuclear warhead.

All that could and should be enough plot but alas, that old Crowe fail-safe, the love triangle, appears too, pitting Gilchrist between his ex-flame, Tracy (Rachel McAdams), who is now married to a decidedly non-garrulous pilot, Woody (John Krasinski), with two kids, and Captain Ng, with whom Gilchrist must obligatorily pine despite being put off by her aggressively outgoing personality. In a way, Ng is just an over-produced cover version of Kirsten Dunst’s much maligned character in “Elizabethtown”*, imposing her P.O.S.I.T.I.V.I.T.Y onto a broken down male until his cynical exterior cracks and gives way. (*Disclaimer: I stand by Claire Colburn, forever and ever.) Except the cynicism from which Gilchrist supposedly suffers after a tour of duty in Afghanistan is woefully undercooked. It's not backstory, it's a parenthetical. It's made worse because Cooper, while aptly turning on the charm when required, barely plays to this supposed battlefield paralysis. Whatever angst the character is carrying never shows up in the performance.

Amidst this romantic quagmire, a truly sublime turn by McAdams is left to rot. She has, as she so often does, a consummate effervescence that all on its lonesome embodies the enchantment of the islands, a mainlander who has been swept up in their mana. Yet her character is conspicuously un-evolved, trapped between This Man and That Man, left to their whims rather than her own, as though, echoing so much of “Aloha”, a serious chunk of something seems to have been left behind on the cutting room floor. Even worse is the ultimate complication of her marriage – that is, her daughter, Grace (Danielle Rose Russell), not being Woody’s but Gilchrist’s. This is a significant situation but one for which the film has virtually no adult nuance. It is presented blithely, like it’s a hiccup rather than a really big freaking deal, and the way it’s handled by all parties involved suggests a forthcoming lifetime of emotional scar tissue for the little girl who barely gets her own say in any of this.

The last scene, involving the daughter, is the film’s best. You’ll want to shake the movie screen and wonder why the whole film couldn’t strike this tone, sincere but also willing to finally acknowledge the confusedly elaborate nature of their dynamic. It’s the one moment when the film looks to the sky and believes, even with both its feet planted firmly on the ground.