“How valuable to the company am I now?”

I really don’t know how to feel about this movie. I was really eager to check it out early this year, but I was unfortunately a little busy at the time of its release and didn’t make it to the theater. Once I saw that it landed on Disney Plus this week, I finally decided to watch it. Just as a preface for my review, this one is definitely going to have more criticisms than positives, but I still landed with an overall score in the middle because the positives to me were pretty still pretty excellent.

Believe it or not, unless we are counting Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, this is my first traditional Sam Raimi horror movie, and I can definitely see why a lot of people dig his work in that genre. Even at parts of Send Help where I really wasn’t all that crazy about it, I was still fairly invested because of just how well Raimi does tension. Yes, the movie is definitely pretty ludicrous most of the time, but somehow it manages to keep this tension and “something feels off” feel to it for pretty much the entire runtime. It honestly gets so ridiculous with it at times that you start to feel like you’re going crazy, just like the characters in the movie itself.

I also think that the middle of Send Help was really good to be honest, and if the whole movie was like how the middle was, I definitely would have rated this much higher. It is by far the most character-oriented section of it all, and it was almost the turning point of it for me where I was finally starting to get into it and actually care about what was happening. I’ll definitely talk about how the highs of this didn’t really matter come the end of the runtime, but I think it’s extremely safe to say that the middle was by far my favorite part of the story. Funny enough, it’s also probably the slowest part, but some things are revealed about our two main leads Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) and Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) that really started to change my opinion on the film as a whole.

Like I kind of said, though, this film wasn’t really for me at all. Thankfully the positives were enough for me to give an “okay” rating for it, but there were also numerous things I just really didn’t like. The first one is just the first half of the movie as a whole. I really wasn’t into it for about the first hour or so, and I mean really wasn’t into it. It obviously first introduces to us our central character, Linda Liddle, and I can definitely say that this was where everything just started to feel off from me from the get go, and not in a good way. I like quirky characters, don’t get me wrong, but her character definitely pushed it much too far for my liking and just set this really off tone that I wasn’t much of a fan of.

Easily my biggest negative with this movie would have to be not only Linda Liddle, but Bradley Preston as well. Both actors do a fairly good job at doing what they are supposed to do, but their characters, to put it plainly, just stink. Preston is obviously not supposed to be likable, essentially serving as the antagonist (which you figure out from pretty early on), but even as we got out of the wacky first half of the story, I honestly didn’t care for Linda, either, which didn’t seem to be intended from my viewpoint. Linda remains just plain off-putting the entire movie, but it wasn’t even that that made me not like her. The thing that really highlights why this movie didn’t work for me is that neither of the main characters is likable in the least bit whatsoever. They’re both incredibly bad people, completely out for themselves so I never had anyone to root for. This seemed to have worked for most people, but it definitely didn’t for me.

And just as I thought I was finally starting to kind of get into it with the middle portion, the last section, and especially the ending, really ruined it for me. If I had to describe it in the most simple way, it just goes way too far. It’s absolutely ridiculous, even more so than the rest of the movie, and completely took me out of it. There are still some standout moments, especially with the tension, but some events that take place and reveals that happen just didn’t do anything for me.

I know that for anyone reading this review, this might get some eyerolls, but the morals and themes here just really put a bad taste in my mouth to be honest, because there were none. Along with the characters not being rootable, they also do sick and twisted things to each other that aren’t presented as if we were supposed to detest what was happening, but are simply there for the sake of entertainment. Revenge seems to be a big player in the film, and neither of the characters learn literally anything by the end of it.

It had its moments, but made me feel “icky” (to say it in the most informal way possible) by the end, and as I said, most certainly not in a good way.