Weapons (2025) ★ ★

 



Sometimes movies are pleasant surprises, but more often they turn out to be dull slogs, at least these days. "Weapons," the sophomore film by "Barbarian" director Zach Cregger, unfolds in the eerie town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, where seventeen third-graders vanish in unison at exactly 2:17 a.m., triggering suspicion toward their teacher (Julia Garner) and touching off interwoven, character-driven chapters featuring Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan as a chilling relative with supernatural intent. Garner’s haunted, morally fraught turn anchors the story’s psychological core, while Madigan steals scenes with a performance that blends menace, dark humor, and mythic dread, garnering early awards buzz. Critics praise the film’s bold, anthology-style structure, its ambiguous, discussion-provoking finale, and its capability to be both terrifying and emotionally resonant. While some viewers cite thematic or emotional unevenness in its latter part, most agree "Weapons" cements Cregger as a daring new voice in genre cinema and stands as one of 2025’s most memorable horror-thrillers. 

This, of course, is what the movie media wants you believe. In reality, "Weapons" is a predictably unstable mess of an overwrought PG-13 thing (it would've been PG-13 two decades ago) that left me wondering where my two hours went. Its only redeeming features are competent performances from Garner and Ehrenreich, and a few gory supernatural scenes that managed to keep me awake. I could delve further into the plot for you, but that's unnecessary -- if you want storyline, go to Wikipedia, and don't worry about spoilers. My beef with "Weapons" stems from the idea being propagated in the media that Garner's character is the quintessential 21st century woman, i.e., an unfairly persecuted young single woman. Early in the movie, while the mystery of her elementary students' whereabouts is still fresh, she is unfairly persecuted by virtually the entire town. Their ire makes it startlingly clear that Garner's character is a typical 21st century woman, and this does little to endear her to me. 

Justine Gandy's first move is to run to a liquor store and buy two bottles of vodka, then go home and down a few. Someone vandalizes her car with the word "witch" in red paint, and when she takes it to the police, she catches sight of an old flame, Officer Paul Morgan (Ehrenreich), who she later meets at a bar and has a one-night stand with. The bar scene is so tone-deaf that it made my brain hurt. Morgan, finding Gandy alone and a little drunk, expresses some concern, and her immediate reaction is annoying defensiveness. As he parts ways the next morning, he tells her to try to let go and leave the investigating to the investigators, clearly concerned for her. She pretends to heed his advice, but retorts with "suck my dick" after he's closed the car door. The scene is meant to be an edgy illustration of "mansplaining" and how tired women are of being glibly patronized by their partners, but it comes off looking immature and petty. 

Also, her drinking problem never manifests as a real problem. I'm so tired of movies depicting men as slobbering alcoholics who can't stand up straight, but when a woman goes on a nocturnal bender, she's bright as a penny the next day. She's attacked in a liquor store by Morgan's jealous wife, played by June Diane Raphael -- who, by any measure, is far more attractive than Julia Garner and would never realistically be in this situation -- but the scene is staged to make the wronged wife look like a deranged stalker: furious, psychotic, and dressed in bright red. Granted, the randy policeman lied and claimed his relationship wasn't really going well (none of this is fleshed out), and he's the responsible party here, but Jesus. We're really supposed to view the problem-drinking single girl homewrecker with a bad attitude as the quintessential misunderstood Millennial woman? Great. We're doing wonderfully, America. 


                                                                                                                                    -- Bill Fontaine


Popular posts from this blog

Longlegs (2024) ★ ★

Image
I went into this movie thinking of the only true horror film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, "The Silence of the Lambs," and expected writer/director Osgood Perkins to deliver. The son of Anthony Perkins ("Psycho") and Berry Berenson ("Remember My Name"), Perkins has filmmaking in his blood, so my hope that he would move the ball forward from Jonathan Demme's 1991 classic seemed a reasonable one. Instead, "Longlegs" turned out to be a massive disappointment.  All the right fixins' are here: good cast (Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood), good cinematography (Andés Arochi), good sound design (Joe Dzuban and Zach Seivers), and good idea -- make Cage a monster, Buffalo Bill style. Yet somehow the film falls flat and lacks substance, dimension, animus, and most of all, scares. There is much ado about "Longlegs" in the online film community, with many hailing it as "almost perfect" and "the scariest ...
Read more

Godzilla Minus One, Minus Color (2024) ★ ★ ★★

Image
Image is property of Toho Studios,   TOHOスタジオ株式会社 "Because, my war isn't over yet."  This line, delivered by Ryuunosuke Kamiki, defines "Godzilla Minus One" (2023). Set at the end of World War II, the film portrays his character as a haggard symbol of the pathos of postwar Japan, a nation wracked by defeat at the hands of Western nuclear might. He is a failed kamikaze pilot who defected in a very un-Japanese and dishonorable way from his very Japanese and honorable suicide mission to hide out at a military repair-shop called Odo Island, and is immediately met with the quiet judgment of his peers; yes, the war is obviously over, and has been definitively lost, but still, he should have obeyed orders.  I viewed this film from a limited lens of having only seen one Godzilla movie in my life: "King Kong vs. Godzilla" (1962), an orgy of model train crashes and corner-store sparklers that I watched on a loop as a kid. It has been widely hailed as the worst o...
Read more

RESERVOIR DOGS (1992) ★ ★

Image
Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut was a sensation in 1992, and officially launched his long and illustrious career of making far better films. Its violence and foul language made it popular, which I think is an indictment of our morally bankrupt culture. I wasn't sold on "Reservoir Dogs" when I first saw it in the nineties, and my opinion hasn't shifted much since. To me it's a crude story filled with bad characters played by excellent actors, and that last bit is what saves it from the abyss -- or saves the pieces, anyway.  It's a tale about a band of jewel thieves whose best-laid plans go seriously awry. We're introduced to eight men, five of whom are the main players, in a cramped diner. The camera orbits their table until vertigo sets in. The script subjects us to Tarantino's trademark dialogue for what feels like an hour. It amounts to small-talk about Madonna songs and tipping, but it's punctuated with incessant cursing and the strain...
Read more