**© Raimi Productions and 20th Century Studios**

Send Help – Film Review

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert

Director: Sam Raimi

Synopsis: Two employees become stranded on a desert island after being the sole survivors of a deadly plane crash…

Review: Navigating the world of work can feel like a lottery. If fortune smiles upon you, you might hit the jackpot and land a job that you truly love, surrounded by a fantastic team that brings laughter and camaraderie as you go about your tasks. Furthermore, you may have a boss who genuinely supports your growth, helping you harness your potential. However, some may find themselves stuck in a gruelling daily grind, trapped in a thankless role under the thumb of an overbearing manager for a company that does not value them in the slightest. Now, imagine flipping that script entirely: what if the employee suddenly found themselves in charge during a harrowing, life-or-death scenario? This intriguing setup sets the stage for a gripping survival story brought to life by the visionary master of horror Sam Raimi.

Linda Liddle (McAdams) is a diligent strategist at an unnamed Fortune 500 financial management company. She is good at her job, but is not always aware of her unkempt appearance and her socially awkward mannerisms, which alienate her colleagues and her new boss, Bradley Preston (O’Brien). Linda is expecting a promotion, but is left furious when this opportunity is awarded to one of Bradley’s frat buddies. To add insult to injury, Bradley seeks to humiliate Linda further by demoting her to a dead-end role, but not before taking her on an overseas business trip to help close an important deal. However, the plane suffers a catastrophic failure en route and crashes into the sea, with only Linda and an injured Bradley as the sole survivors. With no immediate hope of rescue, the two must put aside their differences and fight to survive. However, the ace up Linda’s sleeve is that she once auditioned for the game show Survivor and possesses the skills to help them both survive.

After a nine-year hiatus from directing, Sam Raimi pushed the boundaries to the limit by pushing the Marvel Cinematic Universe into its first big-screen foray into the realm of horror. Alas, such are the confines of the MCU, it held him back and prevented him from venturing deep into the realm of brutal and bloody horror that helped him to make his name in the 80s with the Evil Dead trilogy and latterly 2009’s Drag Me to Hell. Absolutely no such restrictions are holding him back here, enabling him to play in the endless sandpit of a desert island, where you never know what may be lurking in the terrain and resources to stay alive are few and far between.

Gone is the office environment where the boss sits at the top of the corporate pyramid, looking down on their employees with complete and total authority. Such a power dynamic where biases, corporate misogyny and sexism can go unchecked simply does not hold water on a remote island where civilisation is far off into the distance and no amount of money, power, and control can change your circumstances. Damien Shannon and Mark Swift’s script is a delightful and entertaining examination of this upended power dynamic. Imagine if Cast Away and Triangle of Sadness were combined into one big melting pot (minus the yelling at volleyballs in the case of the former) with an extra side of “eat the rich” and Raimi’s signature gore. This is the delicious and bloody outcome.

Having worked together on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Raimi was eager to reteam with Rachel McAdams, and it is easy to see why. Her performance is simply sensational and might just be a career-best. At first glance, it might seem a bit of a stretch for such a charismatic actor to play a socially inept and dishevelled loner who lives with her pet bird, but McAdams leans into it and completely owns it. Like a superhero, when they wash up on that island, off go the glasses and suddenly the Linda we know is gone. In her place is someone who is ready to take charge, and she will not stand for any nonsense from the man who, on paper, is her boss.

But a new location means new rules. It is delightful to see the role reversal, with O’Brien equally brilliant as the smug, pompous, and utterly full-of-himself CEO who has immense difficulty accepting the fact that the power he once wielded over this woman has been swept away. Though when you’re as entitled as he is, that is not something he will give up without a fight. The ensuing power struggle is utterly riveting and leaves you wondering how far these two will go to assert their authority over the other. You might root for her to begin with, given the fact that he is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, but Linda pushes this to its absolute limits. In typical Raimi fashion, there are some particularly gory scenes, and one dark, ominous moment in particular that will likely have at least 50% of the audience squirming with nervousness and dread.

Having two souls engaged in a psychological battle, on an island with a finite amount of space and resources, runs the risk of getting a bit stale. However, thanks to Raimi’s exciting and lively direction, Bill Pope’s lush cinematography, and the charismatic performances, any lapses in the film’s pacing are momentary and not enough to completely skew its momentum. With a $40m budget, perhaps this was stretched too thin, as certain elements of the CGI left a bit to be desired and could have been spruced up. Nevertheless, the film meets all the key performance indicators and is a perfect illustration of why bosses and company executives everywhere would be wise never to belittle or diminish their employees. You just never know when you might need their expertise to get out of a tricky life-or-death situation.

A deliciously grisly and bloody tale of a business excursion gone wrong, with committed performances from Dylan O’Brien and especially Rachel McAdams, ensures this is a thrilling return to form for Sam Raimi.

Mercy – Film Review

Cast: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, Chris Sullivan, Kylie Rogers

Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Synopsis: After being accused of murdering his wife, an LAPD detective must stand trial before a judge and prove his innocence or face execution…

Review: It would not be an exaggeration to say that artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most discussed buzzwords in recent years, and for good reason. This technology has increasingly been integrated into our daily lives in various ways. However, a pressing question remains: to what extent will this technology advance, and could it ultimately lead to the eradication or replacement of certain jobs that one would assume could only be done by humans, such as judges? A futuristic hellscape where a system that has been in place for centuries is made obsolete, and the fate of human lives is entrusted to a machine. After sitting through over 100 minutes of this sci-fi “thriller” from Timur Bekmambetov, the dystopia we’ve seen in countless media where machines have taken over and conquered humanity might just sound a little bit more appealing.

With futuristic Los Angeles gripped by an increasingly severe crime wave, the government establishes the Mercy Capital Court, where defendants appear before AI judges and are given all the resources they need to prove their innocence. If they can put their probability of guilt below 92% within 90 minutes, they will be spared. LAPD officer Chris Raven (Pratt), who helped to develop the concept of the Mercy court, wakes up and finds himself strapped to a chair before Judge Maddox (Ferguson), accused of murdering his wife Nicole (Wallis). With any and all of the evidence he has at his disposal, including CCTV footage and police footage, Chris must establish the chain of events that led to his wife’s death and to find the evidence that will ensure he is not executed and leave his daughter, Britt (Rogers), an orphan.

In this day and age, it would be nearly impossible to find a more relevant film. With the AI genie well and truly out of the bottle, deeply troubling scenes of police and, more recently, immigration officers using brutally excessive force against whoever they please, combined with the widening wealth gap to fuel societal inequalities. All these potent themes would surely be fertile ground for a story that weaves together these pressing issues in our society, raising the question of whether we could really trust the justice system and the fate of human lives to AI.

Unfortunately, Marco van Belle’s screenplay spectacularly squanders this potential. The first mistake is to limit his leading man to being strapped to a chair for the majority of the runtime, a crime in and of itself, given he has proven himself to be more than capable of leading an action movie both on Earth and in the outer reaches of the galaxy. But far more egregiously than wasting Pratt’s potential, the film’s approach to the thorny issue of AI and the defendants’ access to any piece of technology with a camera is extremely sloppy and lazy. It leaves so many unanswered questions about the whole concept of the Mercy Court, its jurisdiction, and its function that it will make you wonder why on earth you’re putting yourself through watching it.

As if that wasn’t enough, the ensuing mystery is just unbelievably dull, and Raven is not nearly given the development needed to make the audience care for his plight, rendering the majority of the 100 minutes of its runtime exceedingly dull in both concept and execution. Ironically, it reads as though someone asked a chatbot to come up with a generic sci-fi thriller about the dangers of technology, and, as an addendum, asked it to make some strange, bizarre choices in some characters’ motivations along the way. It amounts to little more than a poor and hollow reinterpretation of a certain Steven Spielberg film released nearly a quarter of a century ago.

The third act (or more specifically, the final 20 minutes) does perk up a little bit by offering audiences a set that is not just some empty courtroom, if you can really call it that, with a humanoid AI judge watching over you. Imagine it as though HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey became human, only instead of that red light ominously glaring at you, you would have the steely and unflinching gaze of Rebecca Ferguson. Ferguson, perfectly cast for the role of a judge though she may be, her performance amounts to just a spectacular waste of her incredible talent. Someone get this woman a gavel so she can play a judge for real! The threadbare excitement offered up is ultimately too little, too late to make it redeemable. It is an act of relief, or indeed, you could say mercy, for everyone when the credits finally begin to roll.

A premise that offers so much potential and intrigue around a topic that is only going to become more prevalent as the years progress is instead frittered away into a hollow, insipid thriller that doesn’t have an ounce of personality in its hardware.

Verdict: guilty. Sentence: banished to the cinematic doldrums for eternity.