Send Help is now officially tied with Sam Raimi's highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes – and no, it's not sharing the title with his iconic horror The Evil Dead.
The gory comedy thriller debuted to a near-perfect 93% on the review aggregator this week, matching Spider-Man 2's score from 2004. Other titles of Raimi's that linger around the 90% mark include Evil Dead 2 (88%), A Simple Plan (91%), and Drag Me to Hell (92%). In short, Send Help is in good company.
Reuniting Raimi with Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness star Rachel McAdams, the movie follows dowdy office assistant Linda Liddle and her mocking, misogynistic superior Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). After passing her up for a big promotion, Bradley offers Linda the chance to prove herself on an overseas work event. But when their plane crash lands on a remote island, the business trip soon turns into a blood-soaked, hierarchy-testing battle for survival.
In his review, The Film Verdict's Alonso Duralde praised the flick for continually toying with audience expectations. "Viewers might initially sympathize with poor Linda's plight while finding Bradley to be an irredeemable corporate monster, but those initial impressions don't necessarily last," he wrote.
"No matter what, Sam Raimi has taken us back to genre-movie paradise. Send Help is an absolutely unhinged splash," said AMovieGuy.com's Leo Brady.
"A gripping, often brutal exploration of power, control, and inequality. Even when its thematic ambitions falter, its pacing, performances and relentless tension ensure it remains a deeply unsettling offering from Raimi," penned HeyUGuys critic Linda Marric.
"This viciously funny horror comedy is not a typical 'stranded on an island' story," added Culture Mix's Carla May in her write-up. The movie taps into rage that employees can feel when they have a horrible boss, and it shows what can happen when a downtrodden person gets the upper hand."
Not everyone was super into Raimi's latest, however, with Screen Anarchy's Kyle Logan claiming: "Send Help works as comedy every so often, whether it's because of Raimi's penchant for making violence downright goofy or the stars' charisma, but it's so overlong and stagnant as anything else that the majority of it is just a slog."
"It's a movie whose entertaining initial premise and shrewd satire are damaged by Raimi's need to juice everything up with spurious 'horror' flourishes for the fanbase, on-brand gore eruptions that aren't really scary and undermine the film's believability, turning everything into silliness," echoed The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.
Send Help releases in US theaters on January 30, before crash-landing in UK cinemas on February 6. For more, check out our guide to the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way.
