Review: 'Weapons' Wants To Be Great, And Sometimes It Actually Is

With his previous film the 2022 horror hit Barbarian writer-director Zach Cregger proved he has above all else an excellent way of fusing creepy images with a lot of humor to make for a good time jump-in-your-seat night at the movie; one that blessedly never taxed your emotions too much. Even if everybody agrees we hate the term "Elevated Horror," by 2022 we were ready to put those soul-blackening odes to despair in the rearview and just us have some good mean fun. And what is Barbarian if not the 2008 misery masterpiece Martyrs turned into a comedy? (As questionable as I found that instinct to be, I could also commiserate with the liberating appeal of it.)

Three years later, Cregger's back and he's brought with him Weapons, a definite step up from Barbarian that nevertheless adopts that same instinct to twist the darkest sh** imaginable into high gore absurdity--the sort you'll walk out of the theater giddy with. And while he's not quite the tightrope-walker Coralie Fargeat proved to be with The Substance (a far more successful balancing act of the dark and the light through the lens of camp) he's getting better at it! He's still getting in his own way, but nevertheless Weapons is fun, it's deliciously disgusting, it's got one world-class performance for the ages--you'll assuredly walk out of the theater giddy, replaying all the coolest of the cool parts in your head. And that should keep the bad thoughts and doubts at bay for at least a little while. (Except the one about how queer-phobic horror movies are being this year. What's the deal with that? Yeah I'm looking at you too, Together.)

Weapons has a killer hook--one day an elementary school teacher named Justine (an ace Julia Garner) walks into her classroom to find that seventeen of the eighteen children in her class have up and vanished. The police investigate and find more than ample evidence that the kids all got up out of their beds in the middle of the night and ran into the darkness of their own accord, but that doesn't stop the families of the disappeared from painting "Witch" on the side of Justine's car. Or from suspiciously side-eyeing the one adorable little bullied boy Alex (Cary Christopher) who didn't vanish with the rest of his peers.

This much is explained to us in the film's opening (and closing) narration, delivered by a little girl--supposedly an unidentified classmate of the students who says that she know the real deal; the one that the adults ain't telling. So she's gonna tell it! And since, if there's one thing we dig in our horror movies we dig a scary story told to us campfire-like a la John Carpenter's The Fog and that one Friday the 13th, we dig this too. True, Little Miss Narrator's proven not an entirely reliable narrator by movie's end--an early line about all the children never coming home again is smashed to applause-worthy smithereens by the movie's rousing-and-then-some last act. But the little gal sure has fun spinning her yarn of sass anyway. So do strap in and let's make that rollercoaster our bitch then.

Weapons is split into several chapters, each delineated by a different character's point of view on the ongoing events--until it's last act when Cregger finally flips over the table and lets the movie run entertainingly amuck anyway. This lets the tale jump forward and backward in its timeline to show us several of the same scenes from other perspectives, with each chapter supposedly adding levels of knowledge and nuance to our understanding of Weapons' big mystery, aka what happened to those darn kids. It doesn't always work that way, but that's the idea. Teacher Justine's tale is first, then Archer (Josh Brolin), the broken father of one of the missing kids who blames Justine. From there we run head-first into digressions involving a hot mustache of a cop named Paul (Alden Ehreich) who Justine's been having an affair with, and the everywhere-all-at-once petty criminal James (Austin Abrams, having a blast) who's extremely good at blindly stumbling into super f**ked-up situations.

And oh right lest we forget there's the homophobic portion of our evening's entertainment, the chapter involving Marcus (Benedict Wong, great and not in the least at fault for the way these scenes are framed). He's the school's gay principal and he's who, along with his hissing stereotype of a partner (they love weiners and have Mickey and Minnie t-shirts, haha!), the film really relishes giving a heftily violent what-for. Killing your gays is so in y'all.

Anyway if you're anything like the girl sitting next to me at my screening of Weapons, you'll feel extremely proud of yourself for sussing out the basic "clever" reveals that this hide-and-seek form of storytelling necessitates, and you'll have to announce every single one of your sleuthings to your seat-mate. Substantially none of these reveals add much to the story--"Wait, you're telling me the dude who's furious at Justine is the one who painted 'Witch' on her car??? Fetch me my smelling salts!"--but it's an empty-calorie shell-game that Kregger's very good at playing. And one that seems to keep modern audiences off their phones. Hey, embrace the perks!

Still Weapons never entirely convinces that it wouldn't have been better told in a more-straightforward way. There's no real argument to be made that Justine and little Alex's points-of-view weren't enough, and all the rest is padding that takes Weapons straight past the wrong side of two hours. Most of the middle section's spent actively missing Garner anyway, who turns in yet another wonderfully and richly conflicted character with Justine--thorny, difficult, funny, Garner is a total blast. (And she's not even the "world-class performance for the ages" that I mentioned up top. We're getting to that.)

The structural shenanigans (which also plagued Barbarian and seem to be Cregger's crutch) just never truly justify themselves thematically, and keep the feel of scotch tape holding together a hollow contraption straining its seams. Some of that calorie-free tension might be worth it, but Weapons really just wants to fly apart and send its nails and shattered boards in our face. It's at its best once it does.

Because there are a lot of ideas one wants to try to prescribe to "What Weapons Means"--it feels afloat on ideas about the Sandy Hook massacre especially, what with a town mourning the loss of schoolchildren and how that sadness becomes itself a feast for vultures. We even, in a dream sequence, see an enormous automatic weapon floating in the sky, which lends a nod toward such a school of trauma-soaked thinking. So no it's not "Elevated Horror" but it's about Jamie-Lee Curtis' favorite subject anyway, when it colors between its lines.

Yet in its multiple diversions and double-backs, Weapons frustratingly undermines its own meaning as many times as it underlines it. It would be a better story if it got to its point faster, and despite their sometimes fun (so many game actors in every corner!) all its stalling tactics really start to wear thin three-quarters of the way in. As we all know when you play the shell game, you can only win one out of three. Yes the gambler in us does enjoy that high, despite ourselves. Comedown and hangover's another matter, but Cregger's highs are squeaking by just high enough here because he does continue to deliver on those unforgettable images--bug-eyes and airplane wing arms are this year's baby bottle matted with stringy hair in the basement. You add on his ability to cast his films extremely well and to know when to get the heck outta the way of a great performer doing great things, and Weapons does work more than it doesn't.

I saved the film's greatest addition to future cinematic iconography for this review's end though since everything about it is a spoiler--turn thine eyes away now lest you're okay with that! You just can't really talk about Weapons though with talking about Amy Madigan, who turns up mid-film as Alex's visiting kabuki-esque Aunt Gladys who is quite obviously the story's villain the second she appears on-screen. And not just because we've been given several jump-scares of her orange hair and clown make-up before that, like the Bozo spectre of Christmas Future.

Giving what can only be described as the performance we'd have gotten if Ruth Gordon playing Minnie Castavet in Rosemary's Baby had played Longlegs in Longlegs, you need to prepare yourselves right now for a thousand Aunt Gladys sightings on Halloween, and then for her to be a fixture in drag clubs for as long as queer people are still allowed to congregate in public. There is scenery-chewing and then there's necromantic world-devouring, and Aunt Gladys makes the "oop" sound Gloria Stewart made dropping her jewel into the ocean in Titanic as Madigan drops pointed toes first and plunges straight into the cinematic necromancy.

Aunt Gladys is a turn that grants an actor immediate icon status--it's the role you look at and just know will be your obituary headline. It's the kind of feast any actor would suck their vanity between their teeth like soup in exchange for. And Madigan, always a wonderful and reliable force on-screen, slurps and gurgles and giggles and shrieks this sh** to the sky and back. Enjoy your moment, Madigan. You earned it. If there's any reason to re-visit this film over and over again--despite the lapses in logic and fast-forwardable-parts that multiple viewings will make more clear--it's to roll around like a dog in filth in the gleeful malevolence of her, our, forever, inestimable Aunt Gladys.