Weapons Movie Review

 I've seen Zach Cregger's Barbarian film before this one and I enjoyed it. But I went into this film with low expectations because I heard some people hated the ending. Even with low expectations I was blown away by this film. It's more of a thriller mystery than it is a horror experience. There's ample plot, great gore effects, and fantastic acting that borders on silly. You can tell the people making this film had fun with it. Where do I begin?

How about a synopsis? A teacher is accused of hurting children after her entire classroom, except one, disappears one night. All the children get up and walk out their homes at the same night. What I like is the pieces that fall into place. You get several perspectives from the teacher, a father of one of the missing children, a cop, a drug addict, the principal of the school, and the one child that remained. Each perspective gives you a bit of the puzzle and by the end all the loose ends are tied up in a brillaint manner.

One of the draws of the film is these small details that each character has that adds to the plot. The teacher is a recovering alcoholic, the dad is...well, he's a bad dad that can't tell his son he loves him, the cop is a germaphobe, and so on. These details add up and surprisingly made me care about the characters. For example the cop loses his temper and attacks the addict after he gets stuck with one his needles. His panic is palpable as he overreacts and runs for the nearest sanitary solution in his car. He's got his own problems as he's also having an affair with the teacher and is recovering alcoholic. Just these little details that give you another piece. It feels like one of the good M. Night films back when all of the story bits came together. You had to rewatch the film to understand the hints you were given. It all comes down to how you present a story because if it wasn't broken up into parts, I doubt that this film would have worked.

There's also this incredible creepiness to the film as well. There's a long shot scene where the teacher is sleeping outside the remaining kid's house, napping after waiting for something to happen. Suddenly the door to the house opens, its completely black inside. A figure stumbles out and half stumbles to the teacher's car in this weird walk. It's so distrubing and the movie doesn't let you look away. It captures all this in one shot as you wonder if the figure will slit the teacher's throat. Honestly, it's amazing how perfect that scene is. 

I should speak about the dad of the missing child too. He's a bad dad, he tells his son in a dream that he regrets not telling his son that he loved him. He sleeps in his son's bed while the mom seems fed up with his antics. She's likely angry that he hasn't been unable to do anything about their missing son. But life, unfortunately, doesn't wait for us to grieve. The dad still has to go to work and make a living. You see his frustration when all he wants is answers but he's powerless to do anything. He even invades other people's privacy to get info about his missing kid. I've always wondered at those scenes. What drives a person to step out of their boundaries to investigate something that, we as an audience, know is a bad idea. The dad does it and the teacher does it. Is that what Hitchcock called tension in a film? 

Each story starts near the same point and tells you a little more of the story. Each person adds to the mystery of what is going on until it all falls into place. I can't be more vague than that. The only complaint I had was how dark the movie was. The low tint made it hard to see inside the dark rooms. Almost reminded me of that second Alien Vs. Predator movie where it was so dark to obscure the bad cgi. I shouldn't compare the two, they are night and day. 

I'll just come out and say I loved the ending, there was never a villain who had such a perfect death, even by Disney standards. And this was a grewsome but fitting end to an evil character. I remember laughing at each scene at the end as the villain was brought down. I can definately understand why some people hated the ending but, me, I thought it was fantastic.