Weapons
WEAPONS
[Author's note: As with Sinners – Warner Bros.' other original, auteur-driven horror movie that scored massive acclaim and big bucks this year – there's really no way for me to adequately discuss Weapons without revealing a significant, mid-film plot development. I promise to be circumspect, but proceed with caution. Or if you're averse to spoilers of any kind, please skip this review altogether … at least for now.]
There's so much to love about writer/director Zach Cregger's Weapons, including the fact that this brooding horror yarn doesn't stay a brooding horror yarn, that I feel like an ingrate for, in the end, not even liking it very much. The movie opens with beautiful dread and closes with explosive force, and in between there are terrific performances, deeply unsettling set pieces, clever shifts in perspective, a few solid scares, and a surprisingly hearty number of jokes. I'd argue, however, that in order to truly appreciate the film, you have to accept, or be willing to ignore, three apparent truths that proved to be personal deal-breakers: (1) that the film's (fictional) setting of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, hosts the country's most incompetent police force; (2) that the town itself houses the nation's most collectively blinkered citizenry; and (3) that social media, in this world according to Cregger, doesn't exist.
It's frankly shocking how many people I know, and critics I've read, have little to no problem with any of this, and I understand why viewers would want to be generous toward Cregger and Weapons. I want to be generous toward Cregger and Weapons! As the filmmaker demonstrated in 2022's Barbarian, another twisty fright flick that I enjoyed until I didn't, this former Whitest Kid U' Know possesses loads of enviable talents: for establishing juicy genre scenarios; for upending expectation through unforeseen narrative turns and, just as essentially, unforeseen comedy; for being willing to go so completely out there, and with such devastating confidence. Unlike so many lesser horror directors, Cregger doesn't treat his audience like idiots; he trusts that we don't need every plot point spoon-fed to us – that we can make certain connections for ourselves – and also trusts that we can accept a deathly serious situation that's laced, drenched, with broad satire. (Remember Justin Long measuring those Barbarian catacombs for their real-estate value?) For my money, though, Cregger is now two-for-two in riding his films right off the rails. Barbarian eventually went through so many genre iterations, and dabbled in so many hot-button societal concerns, that its only purpose seemed to be getting a rise out of us at any cost. And in Weapons, Cregger is almost too inventive, his apparent making-it-up-as-he-goes-along approach so reckless that it seems to stop mattering if what we're watching makes any earthly sense.
Not that, of course, I can really list my specific grievances – it's obviously way too soon for major spoilers, and even if it weren't, Cregger's admirable devotion to surprise would prevent me from publicly scrutinizing the final half-hour … except to say it's where the majority of my issues lies. What I can share is likely what you already know. With a young girl providing introductory narration, Weapons opens with its conceit that finds 17 third-graders, at 2:17 a.m., running out of their Maybrook homes toward a destination unknown, and, as we're told, never coming back. That the children ran off with their arms outstretched like they were imitating airplanes – like they were having fun – somehow makes the exodus far creepier. The townsfolk are predictably apoplectic about the collective disappearance, their confusion, fury, and grief escalated by a pair of odd details. One is that all the kids were taught in the same classroom belonging to Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), who immediately falls under suspicion. The other is that one, and only one, of her students, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), didn't vanish alongside the others. That's a spectacular premise for a horror-thriller mystery, and it's exacerbated by Cregger's witty decision to deliver clues in chunks, with one protagonist after another taking turns to reveal events – both before and after the mass disappearance – from their individual points of view.
We first spend time with Miss Gandy, who appears both publicly and honestly distraught by the disappearances, and who has been warned in the past about potentially caring too much for her charges – you know, asking about their problems and giving them rides home from school and whatnot. In another movie, she'd obviously be our slightly-elder-ingénue heroine. Because this is a Cregger, and potentially because Garner is a go-for-broke actor who won three Emmys for Ozark, she's a lot more complicated than that. Justine's showcase segment in Weapons' fractured, Pulp-Fiction-esque chronology ends with a jolt, and we're similarly unmoored by the passages featuring five subsequent central figures: Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a grieving, obsessive father of one of the third-graders; Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), a police officer, and apparent nepo hire, whose troubles are linked to Justine's; James (Austin Abrams), an amateur burglar and career drug addict whose path unfavorably crosses with Paul's; Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), the calm, no-nonsense grade-school principal; and young “survivor” Alex, who may not know everything, but who assuredly doesn't know nothing.
Even to describe portions of what happens in these six extended sequences – all of them titled after their main characters – is to risk treading in spoiler territory. But it's safe to say that Cregger has enormous fun with the presentation, and we do, too. There's nothing like an exquisitely delayed reveal to make you feel safe in a writer/director's endgame, and it's a massive kick to discover, for instance, just who scrawled “WITCH” in red paint on Justine's car, and what Principal Miller was doing, and with whom, when Justine interrupted him with a phone call, and why the front door to Alex's house appears to open and close on its own. Your attention and patience are constantly being rewarded here, and so is your intelligence; more than most recent titles in its genre, Weapons keeps your brain in buzzy states of anticipation and excitement. Even though the movie isn't a traditional whodunit, in that (unlike in an Agatha Christie) there's no noticeable trail of story/character breadcrumbs leading us to “the truth,” you really want to solve this mystery. Consequently, it's perversely delightful when Cregger, as he is wont to do, pulls the rug out from under us with a spin no one could've seen coming. Regarding the movie's overall success, this rug pull is both the best and worst thing that could've happened. [Author's note 2: This is your last warning before the previously referenced major-minor spoilers come out.]
Let's start with the best. It's Amy Madigan. For the most part, the film's largely subtle portrayals are first-rate, and if I'm less taken with Abrams' comparative overplaying, it's only because I don't find the conception of hapless druggie James nearly as funny as Cregger clearly does. (To be fair, my fellow patrons at our Thursday-afternoon screening also thought Abrams was a howl.) But while I won't divulge precisely whom she plays, I will say that Madigan has landed in what is probably her strongest role in decades, and gives a performance that might rank in the top five of the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated actor's considerable output over the last 40-plus years. She's that good, and I had no problem with her character's position in the narrative – a pinnacle of batshit-craziness that only Cregger and a handful of others would have the nerve to pull off. (The effect of Madigan's first appearance was nicely summarized by a guy sitting down the row from me: “That was f—-in' freaky.”)
Yet along with the performance genius that is Amy Madigan, what comes with her figure's arrival, which occurs about 80 minutes into the 128-minute movie, winds up being a whole lot of maddening. Suddenly, you can connect the story/character breadcrumbs, at least to a certain extent, and if you think about them for more than a few seconds, they all begin to disintegrate. Hopefully, these queries won't mean anything to you – or, better still, won't stick with you – if you haven't seen the film. But for those who have, were you also bothered by the myriad unexamined loose ends left by the windows covered in newspaper? And the classroom cubbies? And the community's apparent disinterest in Alex's welfare? Why would the cops take the word of ______ without even talking to ______? Why do none of the home-security cameras that record the kids' 2:17 a.m. departure capture the later sight of ______? Why aren't news organizations staking out Justine's and Alex's houses 24/7?
And seriously: Why is no one on the Internet, a mere month after the tragedy, talking about it? If Cregger is making some statement about how quickly, as Americans, we forget about the victims of school shootings – and there's imagery to suggest he is – it doesn't hold water, because to my knowledge, there's never been an unsolved mass school shooting. If there were one, you can bet it wouldn't be yesterday's news until someone was held responsible; amateur sleuths would do far more digging than anyone on Maybrook's evidently worthless police force, as well as any of the sheltered suburbanites who don't even bother to check in on the clearly traumatized Alex. I have other problems with Cregger's film, including with the awkward, imposed reference to its title, and with a lie-posing-as-truth that's uttered within the movie's first 30 seconds. But it's getting exhausting to complain about things I can't yet, in good conscience, complain about. If you see and love Weapons, I get it. If you see and don't love Weapons, I get you.
FREAKIER FRIDAY
After her 2023 Oscar win and 2024 Emmy win and numerous years of omnipresence on talk shows and commercials and social-media platforms, the casting of naturally excitable 66-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis as a naturally excitable 15-year-old is almost redundant. But hey, it's happening in director Nisha Ganatra's Freakier Friday, so redundancy at least comes with the territory.
The film is a followup, of course, to Disney's 2003 Freaky Friday remake in which Curtis and screen daughter Lindsay Lohan magically exchanged bodies, and perspectives, for a sweetly moralistic look at how the other half lives. Here, screenwriter Jordan Weiss' sequel doubles down on the conundrum, having Lohan's single mom Anna swap souls with her mildly angsty teen daughter Harper (Julia Butters), while Curtis' Tess trades places with Lily (Sophia Hammons), a sardonic Brit, and Harper's mortal enemy, who also happens to be the daughter of Anna's new fiancé Eric (Manny Jacinto). Just typing that out, I practically needed a schematic. And although Ganatra's outing is mostly entertaining and certainly harmless enough, it's also one of the more confusing family comedies I've seen in a while – not because the four young-to-senior women switch personalities, but because they don't switch them enough.
Curtis is such an innately vivacious, loquacious presence here – even in the scenes before the supernatural transformation – that not much seems to change when she's suddenly forced to channel the spirit of Hammons' 15-year-old; she just complains about wrinkles and lower-back pain more. And because she's channeling Curtis, Hammons doesn't have to significantly alter her speed or bearing to suggest that a senior citizen is inhabiting Lily's body. She just speaks a little slower, and with more calmed reasoning – which is actually more “grown-up acting” than Curtis is doing as the adult Tess. In short, it doesn't quite matter who's playing whom, and for the life of me, I couldn't understand why, when Tess' body is inhabited by Lily and vice versa, the women didn't speak with the “wrong” British and American accents. Surely the filmmakers aren't suggesting that dialects are physical traits as opposed to a learned ones? (No one is born speaking a particular way based solely on geography.)
Disappointingly, there's just as little evident difference after the soul swapping affects Anna and Harper. It's lovely seeing Lindsay Lohan in a major (non-streaming) role again, and at 39, she appears to have retained all the relaxed charm, wit, and vigor from those halcyon days of Freaky Friday and the 2004 Mean Girls. That's kind of the problem. She's so inherently youthful and energetic that when Lohan is acting like Butters' Harper, it's barely discernible … partly because Butters herself is so self-assured. No one who saw Tarantino's 2019 Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood will forget Butters' turn as the eight-year-old neophyte who schooled DiCaprio in the ways of Method acting, and the subsequent six years have only increased the performer's poise and confidence; this 16-year-old is already an accomplished, bewitching screen presence. She's also so preternaturally assured that Harper, as a kid, seems like a 39-year-old from the start, and has been drawn with so little specificity that the only suggestion of Harper's “troublesome” demeanor is her wool hat. Given all the performative sameness, it's unexpectedly difficult, at any given time in Freakier Friday, to remember precisely whose soul is in whose body. To be sure, the plotting helps. It's the performances that don't.
Still, all four of Ganatra's leads are game, winning comedians who are happily unafraid to look silly, and Weiss' script gives them plenty of giddy slapstick situations to much on – quite literally in the case of the newly teen-erized Tess and Anna as they chow down on burgers and onion rings and everything else their metabolism no longer permits. (Considering the body-image pressures Hollywood surely puts on even pre-adult females, Butters and Hammons must've had a blast in this sequence.) Because I only saw the 2003 Freaky Friday once on the day I reviewed it – unlike the 1976 Jodie Foster/Barbara Harris version that I watched dozens of times as a yoot – I wasn't cognizant of all the cameos trotted out in the new film, and didn't even remember that Mark Harmon was Curtis' love interest 22 years ago. (Great to see him again, though!) But I absolutely recalled Chad Michael Murray, who nearly steals the new movie in his return as motorcycle-riding hottie Jake, as sweet as can be and still holding onto his mommy issues. Murray's flirtations with Curtis – “How old is your husband …?” – are priceless.
We also get the divine Vanessa Bayer as the cut-rate psychic who causes this whole mess, the peerlessly phlegmatic Stephen Tobolowski as Anna's old teacher Mr. Bates, and so much earned sentiment that, embarrassed as I am to admit it, I actually shed a few tears. Beyond the obvious comic possibilities, one of the rarely discussed perks to the body-swap genre is that it allows for heart-to-hearts between characters who don't necessarily know they're having heart-to-hearts, simply because characters don't realize, in the moment, that they're actually taking to someone else. And when, in two separate conversations with Eric, Harper (as played by Lohan) learned just how much her future step-dad loved her mom, and Lily (as played by Curtis) learned just how much her birth dad loved her, I'm sorry – I unashamedly lost it. Both times. Despite its failings, Freakier Friday is a pretty wonderful live-action Disney comedy, and one made immeasurably better by the the unforced sensitivity of Manny Jacinto, who also does some wild channeling of his own, at one point replicating Patrick Swayze's climactic Dirty Dancing moves to perfection. It may be the leading ladies' movie, but this much is clear: Nobody puts Eric in a corner.
SKETCH
This might only be fair to say because the genre has so few examples. But it's entirely possible that, depending on how you classify Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, writer/director Seth Worley's Sketch is the greatest kiddie horror comedy ever made. You could certainly name competitors – Goosebumps, Five Nights at Freddy's, a few titles on Tim Burton's résumé – and I'm well aware that I may be setting higher hopes on Worley's film than can be met. In my opinion, though, this thing is the hands-down happiest surprise of the movie year to date, a work whose imagination and thematic resonance would be more than worthy even if the film weren't so honestly scary (in a family-friendly way) and so honestly hilarious (in any way). My unexpectedly quite-populated Friday-afternoon screening found kids and adults alike applauding the finale, which cheered me to no end, because the clapping was absolutely deserved. Then, because Sketch was distributed by Angel Studios, most everyone dutifully raised their phones to the screen during the end credits to scan the obligatory QR code. Eh. You win some, you lose some.
But really, we all win with this supremely thoughtful, fiercely imaginative tale that tackles the subject of childhood grief in manners neither schmaltzy nor blithe. Quietly traumatized by the recent death of her mother, and not understanding the comparatively collected behavior of her dad and slightly older brother, grade-schooler Amber Wyatt (Bianca Belle) releases her emotional demons on the page, creating voracious hand-drawn monsters as substitutes for the ones in her head. At around the same time, brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) discovers a nearby magical pond with regenerative powers – regenerative enough, he thinks, to transform his late mother's ashes back into Mom herself. Suffice it to say it's actually Amber's notebook that winds up getting submerged, and from the moment that happens, the Wyatts' tiny town is besieged with crayon and chalk monsters that, at best, want merely to steal your coffee cup, and at worst, want everyone within spitting distance dead.
I've seen tons of fright films, and not just PG-rated ones, that weren't anywhere near this unsettling. I've also seen tons of comedies, many of them not suitable for youths, that weren't anywhere near this hysterical. I honestly don't know how everything seemed to go magically right for Worley, none of whose previous shorts or features have their own Wikpedia entries. But Sketch is a true unicorn: legitimately scary when it needs to be, honestly emotional whenever it can be, and funny all the damned time. Regarding that latter praise, it helps that the two most significant adults on hand are Tony Hale and D'Arcy Carden, who certainly know their ways around well-formulated joke structure. The surprise here is that both are also such appealingly sympathetic, convincing dramatic actors. The bigger surprise is that the young Belle and Lawrence more than match them.
I adored nearly every nanosecond of Sketch, with its supremely inventive, large-scale doodle effects and mischievous plotting and larcenous red “eyeders” that recalled everything you loved about the long-forgotten Arachnophobia. (There's also a sinister, black-clad being who, I swear to God, made me think of no one so much as the deranged serial killer in the picnic scene of Zodiac.) Yet Belle and Lawrence are frequently required to pull the comedic, tragic, and adventurous weight of Sketch, and I can't remember the last time I was so fully knocked out by prepubescent performers on-screen, with the movie's other kids – particularly Kalon Cox as resident wisenheimer Bowman Lynch – also giving plenty of spin to Worley's almost distractingly sharp dialogue. Funny, knowing, unassumingly trenchant, and arriving out of absolutely nowhere, Sketch is the Snack Shack of 2025, albeit suitable for all ages, and with the added benefit of being a hoot of a horror flick. I sincerely don't know whether adults or kids will enjoy it more. In honor of the movie's artistic bent, let's call it a draw.
