Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is the office dweeb. Good with numbers, but terrible at nearly everything else, especially social interaction. Her hair a matted mess, her make-up on the garish side of acceptable. She prefers ill-fitting, long out of date beige sweaters, while sporting a beaten up pair of ‘90s-era mules on her feet. A woman beset with a tragic failure of unselfawareness, and an awful penchant for tuna fish sandwiches that she eats directly out of her desk drawer.
Jeered, ignored, and cast aside by everyone else at this large, nondescript company, including the smarmy bros of upper management, she runs especially afoul of the new CEO, cocky and vapid Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), having just inherited the company from his deceased father. Linda, whose work we are told is exemplary, was promised a huge promotion from the company patriarch before his passing, but his son, a sockless, golf playing conk, doesn’t see that working out for her. He sneers at her accomplishments, and brushes aside any possibility of her company ascension.
Letting her down “easy,” Bradley denies her the promotion, but agrees to take her along on the company jet, with a crew of other executive bros (one even in suspenders), on their way to an important meeting in Bangkok giving her a chance to prove him “wrong” about her.
Along the way, though, the plane encounters catastrophic turbulence and plummets somewhere into the Gulf of Thailand, leaving Linda and Bradley as the only two survivors marooned on a small tropical isle. The CEO and his formerly outcast worker drone, up against elements for which name, title, and Swiss bank account numbers matter not in the least.
Essentially, that’s the film’s set up, a classic sort of prelude that could follow any one of a number of different genre branches: comedy, horror, satire, drama, romance, the possibilities as endless as the rolling waves on the deserted beach of its setting.
Especially put in the capable hands of longtime genre maestro Sam Raimi, whose previous body of work includes such high-water geek pinnacles as the original Evil Dead, and Spider-Man trilogies, you can imagine the fun that could be had. Which is why the resulting film comes as such a disappointment: a mish mash of half-baked ideas, and a lack of control over the project’s tone that saps a good deal of enjoyment that might have been.
Working from a fusty script by writing duo Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who wrote a previous installment of the Friday the 13th series, Raimi goes deep in his bag of tricks — comic fish-eye perspectives; extreme close-ups; POV cameras hurtling through jungle terrain; extreme and ludicrous gore — to keep things going, but the indecisive screenplay simply won’t allow for the full Raimi experience.
To begin with, the character work is deeply suspect: Linda is shown to be the kind of antisocial, undiagnosed-spectrum-dweller who makes everyone deeply uncomfortable. Looking to get a huge boost (as promised to her) up to company VP does indeed seem well beyond her abilities. We might loathe Bradley — Raimi, as ever, always happy to send up the kind of rich, entitled jerkwads who always seem to end up in upper management — and hate his ill-treatment of her, but his view — that she isn’t the kind of person who should be part of front facing management — is mostly justified from what we see of her.
Naturally, Linda, who has a bookshelf full of survivalist titles, happens to be a serious fangirl for “Survivor,” pouring over every season, taking notes, and even producing a high-end audition tape (that the suspenders bros are all laughing at right before the plane hits deadly turbulence). Once on the isle, she is very much in her desired element — building impressive huts, fashioning woven baskets out of vines, spearfishing in the ocean, and, in one Raimi showcase, hunting down a frenzied, be-tusked wild boar — while Bradley, his leg badly wounded, his golf shirt dirty and bloodied, can only moan and whinge at her heroic efforts. He’s as lost and helpless in this setting as Linda might be a company cocktail party, but he’s also too vain and stupid to recognize the new dynamic, at least at first.
Early in their stay, there are some swipes at the pair’s changing hierarchical positions: On the island, Bradkey is forced to be subservient to the far better prepared and adaptable Linda, a fact reinforced shortly after he tries to make an escape by himself on a jury-rigged raft that doesn’t get him much past the breakers. In one of the film’s least convincing scenes, Linda poisons him with a temporary nerve-toxin in order to scare him into thinking she has plans to take drastic steps with his masculinity to keep him in line.
There are certainly echoes of Kathy Bates’ immortal Annie Wilkes from Misery, the Rob Reiner thriller that took extreme pleasure in emasculating the male condition, but, again, Shannon and Swift don’t seem to have a clear idea of how they want the audience to respond to the characters. Linda certainly could be the can-do heroine who excels despite being written off by the patriarchy, but she’s deeply rooted in her own psychosis — in one drunken scene on the island she alludes to the way in which she aided and abided her former abusive husband’s death — and the more we learn of her motives the less we want her to succeed. In her way, she’s working the angles on the island as much as one of the suspenders’ bros might have in the office: When, alone and gathering food one morning, she sees a would-be rescue ship circling around the bay, she hides until it passes her by, not ready to let go her idyll.
It’s easy and obvious to disdain Bradley, whose eventual coming around to his former employee we realize all too well is just duplicitous and self-serving, so we’re left with two deeply disagreeable people setting traps for one another and acting in ways that seem both cruel and sort of pointless.
Tonally, the film is also off-the-mark, with comic scenes of hyper-gore (in this film, it would seem Raimi is particularly fixated on what happens to eyeballs when subjected to extreme outside pressure), mixed in with such rom-commy standards as a drunken emotional reveal on a brightly starry night. Is it making fun of the genre? Or making a statement about feminist preservation in the era of patriarchy? Or crafting a pitiless anti-love story, a la The War of the Roses? It remains unclear, even after the film’s ending, a sort of Travis Bickle-like fortune turn, leaves even further doubt how we’re meant to feel about the whole thing.
There’s fun to be had here and there — an unabashed gross-out vomit scene has some spunky comic verve, for one — but the characters’ incoherency and the script’s constant equivocating make this an island from which we very much want to be rescued.
