‘Weapons’ Review

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(SPOILERS AHEAD)

The state of the modern horror picture is a funny enigma—for what it’s worth, horror puts more butts in theater seats than most other genres, and in a time where the art of the movie theater itself is dying, original horror directors are sort of the unsung heroes and miracle makers of the industry. Filmmaker Zach Cregger is no exception—his last film, ‘Barbarian’ turned nearly $50 million at the box office on a $4.5 million budget, so when his newest film, ‘Weapons’—-the story of a classroom full of children who run out of their houses in the middle of the night and never return—got crazy endorsement from Warner Brothers, it came as a shock to nobody. The film’s marketing strategy has been an echo of that of something like The Blair Witch Project or even Paranormal Activity, flooding social media pages with fake footage of children running away from their homes, fictitious Facebook pages for the film’s fictional community, and sham missing person posters.

So, of course, expectations were high for me on this one. After all, why over-promote a film if it isn’t good? Like I mentioned, the film follows a classroom full of children who, at 2:17AM, run out of their houses and vanish. All but one child remains in the class, and what ensues after is a sprawling operatic multi-narrative character drama about a community reacting to a tragedy. And yes, this is a cool idea, but for a film with such an abstractly creepy and engaging concept, it seems barely interested in the idea it presents. For about an hour of the film’s two-hour runtime, it’s a sturdy melodramatic network narrative that intertwines the grief and reckoning of a town in disbelief. Take any of the many characters and their performances. Josh Brolin shines as a father desperate for a tangible truth in an intangible situation. So does Julie Garner as the teacher responsible for the students in the class, and Alden Ehrenreich as a volatile police officer struggling as an ex-alcoholic. All these performances add to the film’s emotional weight, and truthfully, when the picture wants to be scary, it’s deeply frightening and unsettling, especially in that first hour—— and is honestly a very good movie.

What unfortunately ends up happening to ‘Weapons’ is that the film remembers that it must answer its own essential questions: why did the children leave, and where did they go? The answer that follows is pretty disappointing. Remember how only one kid in the class didn’t disappear? Pretty suspicious already, so you’d think that maybe the film would try to subvert expectations and use him as a red herring, right? Wrong. The kid’s aunt happens to be a crazy witch obsessed with the occult, and she’s revealed to have taken voodoo-like control of the children, luring them into her basement. Why? Don’t worry, the movie has no interest in telling you who she is, where she came from, or why she is so intent on possessing children and holding them captive, other than the fact that she wants to turn human beings into weapons for no apparent reason. It’s such an overdone & uninspiring ending to such an inspiring and wildly unique piece of work, and in no way does it match the epic and honestly mature first half of the film. If anything, it’s a picture that collapses onto its own weight—perhaps the premise is so good the film can’t help but fall into itself.

For as much as one can appreciate a story about the ways in which calamity and disaster transform and weaponize even the best and most optimistic souls, you can’t really help but guffaw at the film’s ultimate and untimely fumbling of its own premise. It’s as if Cregger fell asleep while writing the last sixty pages of his script and completely bailed on making something original, sensical, and cohesive, which is very disappointing, because buried underneath its existence, there does exist a deeply terrifying, focused, and satisfying horror movie. But hey, it did exactly what it was supposed to, grossing over $140 million domestically, and nearly $250 million all altogether worldwide, something near impossible for an original R-rated movie in the modern era, so can you really complain?