Comedic thriller Send Help seems desperate to impress its audience, and represents a long-delayed return to home territory for director Sam Raimi, but ultimately a deeply unbalanced tone and a failure of consistency relegate the film to mediocrity. One can see the various ingredients involved, but they fail to gel together. Despite the considerable talent both in front of and behind the screen, this is the very definition of “missable”.

Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a talented but dishevelled strategist working for a large corporation. When the company’s new CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) passes Liddle over for promotion, and then actively demeans her at work, she is at her lowest ebb. When a corporate flight to Thailand unexpectedly crashes into the ocean, it leaves Bradley and a resentful Linda trapped on a tropical island until rescue arrives.

It has been a long struggle for Sam Raimi since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell. A series of collapsed projects kept him out of the director’s chair until Disney hired him to direct their abortive prequel Oz the Great and Powerful, and that film’s commercial failure seemed to leave him confined in filmmaker’s prison until he agreed to helm the sprawling franchise picture Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). This new film reteams Raimi with that film’s co-star Rachel McAdams, who is consistently a superb and underrated talent. She is visibly putting in a lot of effort here, mostly because her character is so inconsistently written.

The film works in near-parodic broad strokes. Bradley is a one-note cliché of selfishness and inherited wealth. Linda is presented as a shabbily dressed and unkempt “ugly duckling” stereotype, who magically becomes more attractive and sexier the longer she is on the island. At first the film appears to follow in the mould of a wronged woman getting her revenge on a nightmare boss. When that storyline begins to falter, it is replaced with a stock “rational man trapped by psychotic and obsessive she-devil” trope. Each requires one of the characters to be unsympathetic, meaning that by Send Help’s ridiculous climax there is honestly no one left for whom to root.

Scenes filmed on location jar against scenes utilising too much CGI. Danny Elfman’s score adds a bombastic, Herrman-esque patina over everything.

Raimi’s old penchant for gross-out blood and gore gets an enthused revival, with a healthy amount of blood and vomit. It does not sit well with the film’s other elements, and that seems to point to a core problem. Whenever events take a particularly savage or confronting turn, Raimi immediately retreats to save territory. Things are revealed to be a fake-out, or are furiously backtracked. At one point events literally turn out to have been a dream. There is no courage behind this picture; just a relatively anodyne urge to please a lowest common denominator.

The variety of styles that Raimi has employed throughout his career have reached a point now where there are arguably multiple Sam Raimis: the gore-loving excessive Sam Raimi of the Evil Dead franchise, the gentle creepiness of The Gift Sam Raimi, the earnest characterisations of Spider-Man Sam Raimi, and the adult drama Sam Raimi who occasionally pops out to deliver gems like A Simple Plan. Audiences get a little of each in Send Help, and I think it would have been better for all concerned for him to pick a single approach and stick with it.