Starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien

Directed by Sam Raimi

Raimi Productions / 20th Century Studios – in cinemas now

After their plane crashes, sole survivors, Linda and her insufferable boss, Bradley, are stranded on a remote island, but can they overcome past grievances to work together and make it out alive?

It’s a lovely set-up, with Rachel McAdams’s dowdy, socially awkward Linda passed over for promotion by her arrogant, casually sexist nepo brat boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). Just as Brad and his objectionable chums are laughing at a video revealing Linda to be an amateur survivalist, the plane goes down in the Gulf of Thailand. Unable to walk, Bradley is reliant on Linda for his survival, but she has scores to settle. It’s fun stuff, although it feels a little slow to get going because the story has been laid out so clearly in the movie’s trailer, and it takes at least forty-five minutes to get to genuinely fresh material.

In genre terms, Send Help is something of a mash-up. The first hour plays out as a workplace battle-of-the-sexes comedy, although we can feel Raimi limbering up when he turns a stray morsel of tuna mayonnaise into a (not very) delicious moment of comedy horror. It’s in the movie’s second half that things get darker, with some enjoyable – if occasionally predictable – twists.

For my taste, it could have taken that turn a little earlier and played out the consequences for longer, giving the movie more time to fulfil its survival horror promise. There’s a moment of brilliant horror-tease at the two-thirds point which desperately needed a full-on call-back in the final act to pay it off. When that didn’t come, I felt slightly cheated.

Verdict: Send Help makes for a perfectly enjoyable 115 minutes, despite being a little slack in places. With a bit of tightening and the horror turned up in the mix it could have been a far more memorable and substantial addition to the Sam Raimi catalogue. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com