Send Help review: Rachel McAdams is hilarious in this genre-busting survival thriller - it's exhilarating, but you'll need a strong stomach to make it to the end

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Send Help (15, 113 mins)

Verdict: Gross, but fun

Rating:

Before last week’s premiere of Send Help at the Odeon Leicester Square, director Sam Raimi, introducing his film, tried hard to be funny.

When his jokes fell flat, he resorted to slapstick. It was more than a little excruciating, but it certainly made everyone yearn for the movie to begin, if only to get him off stage. Maybe it was a deliberate tactic.

Raimi’s many credits include the Evil Dead franchise, the Spider-Man trilogy, the revisionist Western The Quick And The Dead and the darkly gothic crime drama A Simple Plan.

He’s the furthest thing from a one-note director and with Send Help he shows it, blending several genres, uneasily at times, but compellingly too.

Directed by Sam Raimi, new film Send Help follows an employee and her boss after they become stranded on an island

Rachel McAdams plays the character of Linda Liddle, while Dylan O'Brien plays the role of Bradley Preston

Mean Girls star Rachel's character, Linda, is a meek corporate strategist lacking self confidence

Comedy, social satire, survivalist-thriller and gross-out body-horror all vie for prominence, wrapped up in a parable about an underdog fighting her corner.

This film is not for everyone, but it swept me along on a wave of what, by the end, felt like exhilaration.

The story begins in the US offices of a financial services company, where the nervily diligent Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is eager to remind new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) that his late father, the company’s founder, promised her a major promotion.

She deserves it, too. Nobody works harder or more efficiently than Linda. But Bradley has no time for her.

Indeed, she repulses him. He’s an entitled, sexist slimeball, who only rewards the sycophants he plays golf with and is not about to indulge the frumpy office nerd, no matter what his father promised her — and however good she is at her job.

McAdams, it has to be said, is not an obvious choice to play a frump. But she does so impeccably, and hilariously.

In her spare time, with all the focus she applies to her professional life, Linda studies bushcraft and survivalism.

She has even applied to be on a TV show, Survivor, which becomes a source of ridicule when Bradley and his obnoxious entourage find her audition tape online.

Dylan's character Bradley Preston is the newly appointed CEO of the company where Linda works

By now they are all on a private company jet bound for Bangkok, where they reluctantly need Linda’s help in closing a deal.

You don’t need to have seen the trailer to foresee what happens next. The plane crashes in a storm and the only two who make it out alive, washed up on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand, are Linda and Bradley.

From here the narrative starts to follow a predictable trajectory: it doesn’t look as if rescue is imminent so Bradley finally learns to appreciate Linda’s skills, not for spreadsheets but for building shelters, sourcing drinkable water and even despatching savage wild boars.

The unlikely pair duly bond, and there are distinct hints that romance might flourish.

Will Bradley put right the many errors of his ways, while Linda at last discovers what it feels like to be cool? Might they even become soulmates?

Or will Raimi, working from a screenplay by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, whisk us off in a different direction altogether, as if a strong ocean current has suddenly and unexpectedly changed course?

As long as you have a reasonably strong stomach, it’s a surprising amount of fun finding out.