Unpredictable but half-cocked thriller Weapons is guilty of assault with a blunt object

Globe and Mail

6 days ago

Weapons
Written and directed by Zach Cregger
Starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner and Alden Ehrenreich
Classification 14A; 128 minutes
Opens in theatres Aug. 8
Watching Zach Cregger's thriller-cum-fairy tale Weapons is like biting into a poisoned apple – it's at first crisp and refreshing, but it only takes a moment for the pleasure to curdle into something wicked and somewhat rotten.
Of course, any bouts of nausea are to be expected given that Weapons is the much anticipated follow-up to Cregger's sleeper hit Barbarian, a gory bit of business which found new and inventive ways to make basements terrifying again. In that 2022 film, the blighted outskirts of Detroit played host to a particularly suburban kind of horror, one passed down from generation to generation until it was monstrously mutated enough to gobble your soul straight up (or, more accurately, crush your head like it was a ripe cantaloupe).
In Weapons, Cregger is playing with a similar kind of hiding-in-plain-sight bedroom community dread (the obvious metaphor is the school shooting epidemic in the U.S.). But either because he caved to the pressure of levelling up in scale, or simply because he had a great hook but no way to make the means justify the end, the film's thematic arsenal feels half-cocked.
Equal parts Grimm (as in brothers Jacob and Wilhelm) and Anderson (as in Paul Thomas, whose Magnolia is an undeniable influence), Weapons is an ambitious ensemble piece that opens with a young girl narrating in full once-upon-a-time mode. So, as she tells it: One night in the sleepy Anywhere, USA, town of Maybrook, 17 grade three students suddenly wake up at 2:17 a.m., walk out of their homes, cross their front lawns, and vanish into the night, never to be seen again.
Predictably, the disappearances have ripped the community apart, with many parents directing their confusion and rage toward the students' young teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), who doesn't help deter suspicion with her meek demeanour and penchant for late-night booze runs. Leading the witch hunt against her is Archer (Josh Brolin), whose son is among the missing and who decides to make his mission all the more blunt by painting the word 'witch' in scarlet red letters across Justine's car.
To be fair, Archer is in a tough spot. Why, he reasonably asks, haven't the cops thoroughly investigated Justine's past? Or even engaged in the kind of amateur sleuthing that he's been up to, such as triangulating the kids' apparent destination? The police have their own problems, though, up to and including Justine's ex Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a beat cop who might have given up alcohol but hasn't yet cracked the case of his on-the-job incompetence.
And what about the suspiciously quiet Alex (Cary Christopher), the only student from Justine's class who didn't disappear that night?
Quickly and efficiently, Cregger sets up his world and its impossibly high stakes with style to burn. Finally, we have a horror movie director who knows how to properly light a nighttime scene. But once Cregger's narrative threads are laid out, the writer-director has a helluva time stitching them together.
Every time that the story builds to a moment of what-in-the-world shock, Cregger hits the pause button, rewinding the story to explore the perspective of a different character. The chapter-by-chapter structure might have seemed cute on the page, but it unintentionally reveals that Weapons is shooting blanks. When the film's many and frequent fake-out scares are more haunting and effective than the actual nightmare at the heart of the tale, there is little to do but shut up and laugh.
Not that Cregger is above or disinterested in comedy. Just as in Barbarian – during which Justin Long delivered a punchline so perfect that it split as many sides as the film's monster did heads – Weapons proves that the director has a killer instinct when it comes to gags.
The trouble is that the film's big third-act joke feels like one being played on the audience instead of its characters. Many of whom, it should be noted, come off as exceptionally stupid, far past the point that Cregger seems to be making about the general delusion and ignorance afflicting authority figures in small-town America. The cops failing to keep the peace in Stephen King's horror hamlet of Derry, Maine, have got nothing on the Keystone Kops patrolling Maybrook.
The final stretch is all the more frustrating given that every member of the cast is doing exceptional work, from Garner (who must've breathed a sigh of relief to act without metallic makeup following her Silver Surfer duties in Fantastic Four) to Ehrenreich (playing the most Magnolia-coded character, his cop in full John C. Reilly mode). Brolin is also particularly strong as the tormented and desperate father, his performance so sturdy that it anchors the increasingly zany madness that surrounds him.
The very last shot of the film almost compensates for its missteps and miscalculations. It also marks the return of the young girl whose voiceover opened the film – and confirms her to be a rather unreliable narrator. But the nagging problem with Weapons is it concludes without clear evidence that Cregger is aware that, as a storyteller, he is just as untrustworthy, even reckless. Shoot first, I guess, ask questions later.