All the same mistakes director Zach Cregger made in the preposterous Barbarian he has made again in the equally ludicrous Weapons.
The premise is engaging enough. In a small town, an entire class (except for one weird ass kid) all run from their homes at 2:17 AM the very same morning “never to be seen again”.
They are “never to be seen again” because the police force in this town is the most inept bumbling idiots in cinematic history. Despite living in the digital, Big Brother, age where there are cameras everywhere to the degree that authorities can often easily and successfully track the routes taken by any suspects fleeing crime scenes these morons cannot track SEVENTEEN kids, a massive group of children from houses all over town and perhaps triangulate possible locations. I mean, a regular dude does that later on in the movie using nothing more than some video footage, flags he plants into the ground and a map of town, outlying area.
That is but one aspect of a bonkers story that we are being asked to going along with. Now, putting reality on pause is often part of enjoying an entertaining story but there is temporarily believing the unbelievable and then there is boarding the crazy train and asking for a lifetime pass, which is what Weapons asks us to do.
Weapons has so much padding you would think it is a mattress commercial. It told from many different perspectives but unlike films like Pulp Fiction, it is done to inflate the runtime and give the director an excuse to repeat situations, scenes as well as insert even more background that doesn’t provide any useful or meaningful context.
One gets the sense that Weapons was probably a kernel of a interesting idea, a short story let’s say, and as such needed a lot of stuffing and filling to make it into a feature film feast and not a light snack for studio executives. There just isn’t much meat on these bones. It is like set piece after set piece all stitched together with lots of insulation in-between.
If you are going to frame your film’s story and marketing around a mystery, like many slasher and Giallo films do, there had better be a satisfying or at least intriguing payoff. As we have already discussed, the ‘how’ of the kids disappearing is asinine. Without giving away any spoilers, what is equally as air-headed is how others are affected later on. It is silly, silly, silly. The ‘why’ though is even more dopey than that. Nobody can take any of that seriously. When revenge is finally exacted it is as funny as one of those sped-up, slapstick chase scenes in Benny Hill. All that’s missing is the laugh track and the rapid-fire saxophone.
Then, there is all the darkness, all the dimly-lit scenes. The continual squinting to make out crucial details, just to see what the hell is going on becomes a chore just as it was in Barbarian. As legendary directors John Carpenter and David Lynch taught us, there are ways to use shadow for great affect in a horror movie. Not everything needs to be hidden in the dark or veiled in gloom. That’s just lazy film-making.
In the last 20 years, there have been a lot of bloated feature films that would have played out better as episodes of a horror anthology either as a TV show or a movie. Many of Jordan Peele’s films, entries in the Conjuring franchise, The Monkey by Osgood Perkins which was based on Stephen King’s short story, found footage movies, all come to mind. They are stories that would have been better off in a more concise, shorter format. You can chalk up Weapons as another one of those, a story better suited to a throwaway episode of Monsters or Tales from the Darkside than a blockbuster, summer release. The grandiose hype, the overblown marketing campaign has in the end been much ado about nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. There are a lot of cheap laughs to be had with Weapons.
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