Rating: C-
Dir: Sam Raimi
Star: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel
After the disappointment which was the underwhelming Drag Me to Hell, I was hoping this might be a return to form for Raimi. As the grade above suggests, it really isn’t. It’s now almost thirty years since what I’d call his last genuinely good film – 1998’s A Simple Plan. It may be time to give up hope of anything more than the intermittently entertaining, bland and misguided offering we have here. We get a lengthy, not very interesting preamble, establishing company drone Linda Liddle (McAdams) as a prototypical nice girl who finishes last, and CEO Bradley Preston (O’Brien) as a useless dick, born into his privilege. The pair are then stranded on a remote desert island, after their plane crashes.
The boot is then on the other foot, for Linda is a wilderness survival expert. Though the evidence we see of this is largely limited to her audition tape to become a competitor on Survivor. [We watch Alone: we know actual wilderness survival is a little trickier.] Anyway, she revels in the opportunity to be the boss of Bradley, to the point where she actively walks away after seeing potential rescue. Meanwhile, he does not take well to discovering how unprepared he is for the real world. It seems only a matter of time before one or other of them – or possibly both – go full Lord of the Flies. And it might not be a pig’s head on a stick they’re wielding.
There are some good moments here. Linda’s first attempt at boar hunting (top), while leaning heavily on obvious CGI, is still nicely blood-drenched and brutal. The reveal, too, has nice energy, when we discover just how deep Linda’s deception goes, in the service of maintaining her wilderness superiority. However, there were a lot of scenes which didn’t feel like they added much to proceedings. I’m not sure the message here is quite what some people think either. Linda is hardly heroic: there’s good reason nobody at her place of employment likes her as a person. Initially, he’s a jackass and she’s a doormat. But he becomes a (somewhat) better person, while she turns into a psycho, prepared to kill innocent people to defend her delusional worldview. This is “good for her”?
The harsh reality is that life does require social skills, rather than just competence. It’s not misogynistic to pass over Linda for vice-president; she would be disastrous for the financial services company which employs her. Critiques which see this as sexism, leave further analysis built on a flawed foundation of Linda as victim. This problem is the fault of writers Damian Shannon & Mark Swift. Their previous movie was the Baywatch reboot in 2017: I’d not be surprised if it had greater depth, and a more consistent moral compass – plus, I suspect, a better ending. In the one we get here, I kept expecting Linda to wake up and find herself back on the island. Wish they’d had the courage for that.