Time sure is a cruel mistress. Just two decades ago, upon the dual release of 2004’s Mean Girls and The Notebook, you’d have thought that downtown Los Angeles was already carving out space for Rachel McAdams’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; today, the city hardly knows her name. Tinseltown has a history of discarding actresses earlier than expected, and the Wedding Crashers alum didn’t do her career any favors by signing on to one stale franchise entertainment after another, but neither acknowledgement can justify the last decade of sparse onscreen activity. Director Sam Raimi must see her as something of a kindred spirit, having graduated from his beloved Evil Dead trilogy to usher in the superhero era with a three-pack of Spider-Man flicks, and little else in their aftermath. Sure, McAdams has Spotlight and Doctor Strange, just as Raimi has Drag Me to Hell and Oz the Great and Powerful, but those films are small potatoes when you consider the aughts primacy of both industry mainstays. They’ve teamed up to prove their continuing relevance with Send Help, though the best laid plans don’t often account for shifts in cultural appetite. Just when you thought you were in, they pull you back out.

Linda Liddle (McAdams) knows a thing or two about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, even if the blunders required to set that faceplant in motion are never her own doing. Working tirelessly as a desk-bound strategist, Liddle is finally primed for a promotion when the unseen passing of the company’s founder feeds her dreams to the paper shredder. The destruction is doled out carelessly by Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), the new N.E.O. (Nepobaby Executive Officer) on the scene, an exquisitely-groomed embodiment of entitled chauvinism. Disingenuously dangling the Vice President title in his underling’s face, Preston convinces Liddle to accompany him and a fraternity of boorish yes men on a business trip to Thailand, only for their plane to plummet from the sky to the shores of a nearby island. As the crash’s lone survivors, the odd couple adjust to a new way of living on the fly, wherein the previously revered corporate hierarchy holds no power.

All that sway has reverted into Liddle’s previously trembling hands, and watching them steady still holds appeal after all these decades. Eat the Rich flicks date back to film’s inception, but there’s been a glut of them since theaters reopened after the Covid pandemic, a list that includes, but is in no way limited to, Dumb Money, Saltburn, The Menu, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Breaking new ground we are not, but true originality is a rare and ambitious thing, a pair of would-be goals that Send Help retreats from in favor of crowd pleasing familiarity. It’s hard to fault the calculus; plenty of good movies get by on remixing what’s worked in the past, and so long as most ticket buyers remain in a lower tax bracket, watching the wealthy and unfeeling get their comeuppance will have an evergreen appeal. One wishes the whole thing didn’t bear such a striking resemblance to the final third of writer/director Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, but when you’re working off a template, side doors are hard to find.

Whatever potential remains for shock and surprise resides in the character of Liddle, whose diminutive manner belies a darkened, hard-bitten soul. That’s quite the achievement given her generic set-up, which resorts to tuna fish sandwiches, lonely interactions with a pet bird, and a hellbent obsession with Survivor to communicate Liddle’s lowly stature. Her island-bound transformation is predetermined, but screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift deftly position her as the chaos variable within a film that’s otherwise dutiful in staying on the tracks. Years of witnessing genre flicks put real danger on the table before snatching it away have numbed us to threats of real trauma and upheaval, which makes Send Help’s genuine sense of fearful possibilities both engaging and impressive. When it warns of upcoming turbulence, you actually believe it.

None of this would be possible without McAdams, whose evident joy in getting to sink her teeth into something this juicy is contagious. The actress’ dispiriting lack of roles over the last decade seems to be a central talking point wherever Send Help has been discussed, but the flip side of that coin is how much audiences have been missing her singular presence. Multifaceted and always game, the movie is as much an excuse to bask in her charms as anything else, which makes the miscasting sting all the more. She’s entirely too beautiful to make the opening passages work, her knee-weakening eyes easily fighting through a lightly tousled head of hair and some ill-fitting clothes. Her subsequent glow-up fits neatly into a 90’s lineage of haphazardly submerged hotness, using She’s All That and Never Been Kissed as a launch pad toward something more sinister and autonomous, but the metatextual justifications are too left brained for a movie that’s so tethered to the right. O’Brien is doing yeoman’s work to balance out the playing field, crafting one of the most immediately detestable men to soil the screen in many moons. When it comes to villainous performances, the audience’s fervent wish for the worst possible outcome constitutes the highest praise available, and from the second Preston walks on screen, mouths water for vengeance.

Who better to give it to him than Raimi, a savant of cartoonishly gory kills and rousing retribution, but the auteur apparently left his sharpest knives at home. Graded against his contemporaries, the B-movie luminary still has some dastardly tricks up his sleeve, with a mid-movie CPR sequence nearing the inventively disgusting highs of his cherished filmography. The idea is there, but so is the CGI, a luxury of the film’s reported 40 million dollar budget that Send Help leans on like a crutch. Drag Me To Hell suffered from the issue, but Bob Murawski, Raimi’s editor of choice, had more vim and vigor back in 2009. The visual language he shares with cinematographer Bill Pope is more boilerplate this time around, the faux-comic book panels of their best collaborations only peaking out here and there amidst a presentation that’s most comfortable in the middle lane. Money has a way of making us all more cautious.

It’s a real damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation, finally reuniting with a pair of our favorites inside an industry that’s changed in ways that don’t suit their strengths. Raimi is better with less budget and less studio oversight; he’s still in there, but it’s difficult to clock his eccentric wrinkles when they’ve been ironed out for purposes of marketability. McAdams should never have been relegated to Hollywood afterthought, but in a truly cruel twist of fate, her ham-fisted casting here presumably takes work away from some unknown, aspiring actress who would actually be right for the part. She’s electric and all wrong at the same time, proving her vitality, yet again, despite the inideal circumstances. A knee-jerk championing of Send Help is understandable; we’re all starving for original narratives, however derivative, and long to rejoin our friends, even if their deployment is ill-considered. As fate would have it, McAdams just received that aforementioned star in conjunction with the movie’s January release, an honor that doubles as an outgoing salutation. She shouldn’t be spoken of in the past tense just yet, and neither should Raimi, but the road back to their shared heyday is in need of some serious repairs.