Review: Weapons Is Almost a Great Movie

It's good summer fun if you lower your expectations.

If you grew up with the greatest horror movies ever made, as I did, you might always be slightly disappointed when you see horror movies now. The Shining, The Thing, Alien, and The Exorcist are some of the greatest films ever made, not to mention those that came before, Psycho, Don’t Look Now, etc.

With Weapons, we have much to be grateful for, starting with the best thing about it: it’s not “woke.” People always say that, and movies almost always are, but not this one. It is cast and told in such a way that it isn’t ideology-driven. It doesn’t virtue signal. There is no MESSAGE.

Written and directed by Zach Cregger, Weapons is in some ways a companion piece to his last movie, Barbarian, which put him on the map. Both films are set up more or less in the realm of the normal and then open another dimension of reality and introduce the supernatural and the grotesque.

I was hoping for something a little deeper in terms of the characters. There are loose ends and dangling plot holes, and things that don’t make complete sense. It doesn’t have a message anywhere in it about suburban American life or school shootings, or identity. It’s more about structure, pacing, and rhythm than it is about story.

And that’s the film’s only real problem — the writing. He wants it to be along the lines of Psycho and Don’t Look Now, or Rosemary’s Baby but, at least to me, it doesn’t quite get there. But I feel a little silly complaining when we have an original movie that might not be perfect but it is headed in the right direction for Hollywood.

The best part of Weapons is the first 2/3rds where we are introduced to various characters’ points of view as they navigate a mystery in the town. A classroom full of students disappears into the night. No one can find them, but they begin to suspect the teacher, played by Julia Garner.

We follow her story for a while as she intersects with other characters in the movie. Then the story shifts to a different character, and we watch their perspective. Slowly, the mystery unravels, or so we think. There is a way of seeing the movie through the eyes of an unreliable narrator. Maybe what we saw is the true story, maybe it isn’t. We don’t have a resolution by the end, and it’s unclear if we are meant to see it as open-ended.

If it is told by an unreliable narrator and what we see at the end isn’t everything that it seems, then it is probably a much better movie than it seemed like it was to me on first viewing. I’ll leave open that possibility before making a final assessment. Perhaps there were clues I missed, and I got it wrong. I’m willing to accept that as a possibility.

Either way, the movie is either about a creepy kid or it’s about the kid’s creepy aunt. I won’t spoil it here, but just to say, it might be one of those movies where it’s open to interpretation and people will debate about it for years, or at least until the sequel comes out.

It’s not easy getting out to the movie theaters now, especially when we know that most movies are agonizingly woke — with Hollywood’s eternal message being, “we’re the good guys and all of you lowly ticket buyers are the bad guys — and the cost of ticket prices equal one month of content on streaming.

It can also be annoying seeing movies with a lot of people. Cell phones go off. People talk. One guy got up and had his conversation outside in the hallway without realizing we could all still hear him. And then there is the audience reaction which can make or break a film experience. Did they love it and clap at the end? Or did they groan?

I arrived at the movie theater at showtime but the show didn’t actually start until 30 minutes later. Before that are trailers, which I don’t mind, and ads that I do mind. Knowing this, I will likely show up 15 minutes later than the designated time.

Weapons is good Summer fun and well worth the price of a movie ticket, just make sure you lower your expectations and you will come out of it satisfied. If you expect too much from it, as I did going in, you’ll probably think at the end, “Is that all there is?”