Zach Cregger is kind of like the white Jordan Peele. By that I mean he pivoted away from doing sketch comedy in the early 2000’s to writing and directing critically acclaimed horror movies. I wasn’t a fan of Barbarian, his first foray into the genre, but it had enough bright spots to make me curious what he’d do next. His follow-up, Weapons wound up being a big box office hit, though I’m not exactly sure why.
A small town is left in shock when seventeen kids simultaneously run away from home in the middle of the night. Making their disappearance even more curious is the fact that they all had the same teacher (the omnipresent Julia Garner). An angry father (Josh Brolin) then sets out to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Weapons admittedly has an interesting hook, and the initial scenes suck you in right away. However, the film gets bogged down almost immediately. Like most “elevated horror” flicks, it suffers from an inflated running time (over two hours) and the structure isn’t exactly optimal for this sort of thing. The movie is broken up into chapters that revolve around members of the town who are dealing with the disappearances. Sometimes these scenes intersect a la Pulp Fiction. The problem is that some of the stories seem like an attempt to tiptoe around the central mystery instead of dealing with it head-on. I mean you can only get jerked around so much before you start looking at your watch. In fact, the structure honestly is just a means to dress up the narrative. Had things played out from point A to point B, it would’ve been really underwhelming. The dream scenes are rather ho-hum too and only serve to eat up more precious screen time.
It doesn’t help that by the time the woman who is at the center of the disappearances (Amy Madigan) finally shows up, she looks like a cross between Estelle Getty in Golden Girls and the mom from Rugrats.
Weapons does have its moments, but they are mostly weighted towards the first and last ten minutes. I mean, any movie that features an ending that manages to crib from both Point Break and Day of the Dead can’t be all bad. It’s just a shame that script spends so much time chasing its tail in the middle section of the film.
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