All the other kids, with their pumped-up kicks

WEAPONS

2025

Written and directed by Zach Cregger

Spoilers: moderate, I think

Simply as a matter of honest observation, we have to admit that Zach Cregger has established himself very well in horror; 2022's Barbarian was a big deal and his follow-up, Weapons, was an even bigger one.  I was going to write, "besides Sinners, it was the defining horror film of 2025," and I still suppose this would be correct; it would be all the moreso if I also said "original," though a couple of franchise horror films outgrossed it.  (Meanwhile, in the "original" category, it would crucially depend on how irritated it would make the average self-described horror fan to be reminded that KPop Demon Hunters is a horror movie.)  That Cregger has achieved this position, of perhaps the preeminent horror filmmaker to have made his name in the 2020s, is quite needless to say but one more piece of evidence that we're living in the ruins of civilization, and there's a great deal that is very particularly "of the 20s" about Cregger's movies, though his specific signature, of not having the attention span (or at least the foresight or discipline) to write a complete, cohesive story for his movies, meaning they have to start over partway through in order to keep themselves going and then, because they've shot down so many blind alleys in the process, is why they're simultaneously so obnoxiously long, is the part that feels the most innovative and personal to him.  I'm miserably anxious that this ADHD horror that Cregger's championing could well be the new "thing," even as this new thing continues to encompass all the terrible old things from our contemporary era of horror, such as Cregger picked up from his immediate forebears and has not, by any means, repudiated yet.

It's an improvement over Barbarian anyway, which is sort of annoying in its own right: there's no version of Barbarian that's still Barbarian that's any good, but I think there could be a version of Weapons that's perfectly fine, possibly even one that you could carve down from the footage in the film's commercial release (it would, obviously, not run 129 minutes in the "perfectly fine" configuration), basically just a neat little horror movie about a witch invading suburbia as a metaphor for... absolutely Goddamn nothing that I can parse, which would be pretty cool in our current age except it clearly wants you to think she must be one, but let's leave it, right now I'm harping on the structure.  For the record, I'd gotten it into my head that the people talking about the movie's occult villain were effectively spoiling a twist, but, mea culpa, they weren't: she appears early enough to make the basic shape of the movie's plot clear enough that, unlike Barbarian, I don't think we can say Weapons bears a single true surprise, structural or otherwise.  The surprise instead is just that it's "doing structure" at all and in such a garishly baroque way—I guess that was my topline criticism of Barbarian, too, but Weapons doesn't blow itself up with it, even if it clearly requires structural fuckery much less.  Either way, what's been decided is that this horror movie about a witch in suburbia needs is to be badly Pulp Fictioned for no reason that I can imagine Cregger could articulate.

It's futzing with how you'd "naturally" tell such a story from jump street, opening with a voiceover (not from any figure within the narrative, just some child actor who is, frankly, not at all being directed to do a good job) that, in combination with the film's more interesting visual conceit of children running through the night with their arms stretched out like birds attempting to take flight, relates the doom that's already come to Maybrook, PA.  Whatever else, it's a remarkable and original premise: one night at 2:17, seventeen children woke up and left their respective homes and fled into the darkness unknown.  Moreover, they are all from the very same elementary school class, taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), and of the entire class it's only its teacher and one single student, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), who show up that morning.  And I guess I'll just point out that nobody would be showing up that morning, or if they did they'd be walking into the chaos of an active crisis: seventeen sets of parents would have already called the cops (and likely numerous others) an hour or more ago, when they woke up to discover their children had disappeared.  This is nitpickery of the highest order, I agree; but I just want you to keep it in mind when we circle back to what a sloppy, lazy piece of crap Cregger's structural exercise allows his screenplay to be.

The movie proper begins a month later, with no answers about the disappearance of the seventeen.  Suspicion has very naturally fallen upon Justine—it has very unnaturally not fallen upon Alex, like, even a fucking bit—and Justine, a cartoon alcoholic, has already begun her implosive spiral under the pressure from a town that's apt to blame her because even though not a thing points to her besides the circumstances, just look at the circumstances; there's the saying about eliminating the impossible, but if the impossible is all you have, one might tend to cling to it.  Such is the case for Archer Graff (jeez, is that ever a character name; Josh Brolin), father of one of the missing who's imploded himself, given over to harassing Justine but—like Justine, in fact—he is after the answers, and gets pretty far in his own investigations by doing the extraordinarily basic work, so basic you'd feel pretty certain even lousy cops would have done this, of comparing doorbell cam videos of the children and trying to triangulate their lines.  His investigation collides with Justine's at a gas station but is interrupted by Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) who's become some kind of bug-eyed, blood-spewing zombie (fast-style), directed at one or both of them "like a heat-seeking missile"—like a weapon, eh?—which is where our structurally-minded horror movie starts looping back in some pretty damn bad ways.

I mentioned Weapons: The Perfectly Fine Cut would not run 129 minutes (I mean, that would be almost axiomatic), but it might have trouble hitting seventy, and at least some small part of that is not telling its story the way it "naturally" would be told, either having so much as a minimal baseline-setting introduction such as a normal movie would have, or bothering very much with the month in between the inciting incident and the beginning it does have.  And there's an argument that it doesn't really "need" either to tell its story—that month would be devoted to fruitless police investigation and, as an audience, surely we are more interested in the affected civilians' more personal adventure—though the story Cregger's elected to tell is clearly a problem for him: whether he would ever admit to this or not, the function that his more-or-less-an-anthology structure is going to serve is to cheat actually telling one, essentially a permission slip to write a bunch of sketched-out characters who don't ever need to be able to a sustain feature's length—and, for that matter, barely need to interact with one another at all, at least for more than a scene or two, so he barely needs to write dialogue for those characters—while also obfuscating how little his story makes sense.

And good grief, does it not: there's the fundamental objection, of course, that this just would not be how this town, or this state, or these United States' federal government would possibly react to this situation within the timeframe provided—it'd be a national fascination with effectively infinite resources poured into it (in the movie, the parents offer a reward of the princely sum of $50,000, I mean, really) and very few limits to how the investigation would be undertaken, by the common consent of the entire town—but I don't think we need to reach for "what fucking universe is this?" when far-less-than-infinite resources would seem to have been able to solve this very-easily-solved mystery.  It is, indeed, so easily-solved that Justine basically does so by doing almost nothing but pursuing the most obvious lead, though as we wheel backwards through time it becomes pretty baffling how nobody but her twigged to it.  (So, Alex's parents employers, for instance, just shrugged?)

And, you know, I think this is where the movie might actually be trying to do some kind of social commentary, however obtusely, but again more as a cheat, and it's worth taking a moment to express how sort of wretched I think Cregger's deal here is: this is a movie about the disappearance of seventeen schoolchildren and it's called "Weapons," for fuck's sake.  It blatantly wants to lock your interpretations of it onto a very particular set of rails, or at least laugh at you when it's not about what it's obviously about, but I suspect the idea, if there is one, would be "society does nothing about school shootings, so why would they do anything about this?", and some people should just stay away from allegory.  It is, anyway, pretty disgustingly desperate to reap the benefits of its unearned associations, and Cregger gets up to what I would be confident describing as the most garish moment of the entire cinematic year of 2025 during one of the recurring nightmares that Archer's been suffering over the unresolved fate of his poor son, in which he sees him fly into a dark house over which manifests a giant AR-15 in the sky, which is the sort of ludicrously idiotic swing I might approve of, even if I didn't like it, but there has to be some kind of limit to one's indulgence of the most tasteless artistic gestures imaginable, hasn't there?  As for turning the kids into AR-15s, or whatever the hell the hazily-expressed notion is supposed to be, by the end of the movie I daresay you could complain that while her motivations are pretty straightforward, it's never all that clear why the villain has needed all this time with them or what she's bothered doing with them during it.  Seems like the kind of thing where you'd want to exit as quickly as possible.

Regardless, that's not even close to the shitty part.  I've said it's more-or-less an anthology, decisively trending towards "more," arranged in chapter format heralded by title cards bearing a character's name, each of its six (or seven? it feels like it would be seven) segments being devoted to one of them and their particular place in the ages 3-8 puzzlebox of the movie.  You will have noticed I've only named four—I have, furthermore, alluded to Alex's Aunt Gladys (Amy Magidan), a female drag queen type of creation, whom I will agree is memorable and creatively-arrayed by Madigan if not, as the proponents would have it, in any sense iconic—which is because it is only those five who matter, but the movie has two more, cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) and junkie James (Austin Abrams), who have about forty minutes' of screentime to sort of randomly interact with the plot (they eventually fulfill a role in Gladys's evidently ad hoc plan), though most of their segments wind up being about each other.  (Paul gets a better time of it, being Justine's ex and the person she turns to even though they're evidently a bit toxic to one another, and while Paul has a heel turn largely predictable in the Cregger context—you know, if my youthful interactions with the police were getting punched real hard in the face but then getting cut loose, I'd have been the Democratic Governor of South Carolina by now—James is such a manifestly unacceptable character I somewhat regret putting him in a parenthetical.  Just holy Jesus, despite Cregger's compulsive need to assure you he has left-liberal politics, I literally don't think I've seen a more offensive addict stereotype in my entire life.)  Anyway, James and Paul are awful, sort of recognizably the creations of a former comedy sketch writer—I feel like an enormous fraction of Cregger's problems stem from that description, "former comedy sketch writer"—allowing ideas to roll all the way down the hill, but they're certainly not funny, or interesting, and whatever successes the movie has scored up till now are meaningless once we mostly-pointlessly drift over to their interminable, stacked-atop-one-another filler segments.

And there are successes.  For one, Gladys is an enjoyably camp figure and could've been more successful still in more forgiving circumstances (Madigan's is nearly the only good performance in the bunch, but Brolin is somewhat incapable of such a thing as a bad performance and doesn't give a bad one here despite having a one-or-no-dimension character to work with, and I suppose I would be happy to add young Cameron to the "good performances" column, too, even if that performance is locked to even straighter lines than Brolin's; Garner, for all intents and purposes our "star," is leaning way too readily into the unlikeable sharp edges of a character with nothing whatsoever in the script to counterbalance that with, so choices that might well have thrived in a more complete narrative environment only become irritating here; Wong is fine and has the movie's neatest makeup applied to him, but, forgive me if I'm wrong, seems to be insisting on doing some kind of a "voice" so he sounds like Choose Goose).  But mostly it's what I said earlier: the "conventional" version of this would be pretty good.  If Barbarian suggested—I certainly do not think it actually proved—some talent at directing horror within Cregger, Weapons gets much closer to dispelling my skepticism, and for all that "cutting through the screenplay's dross" is in fact a director's job, he's at least building some terrific setpieces and crafting some memorable imagery.  The avian flocking of the children is delightfully creepy minimalism, evoking dread and loss—and inhumanity—with nothing but the mere suggestion of wrongness to get there with it; the gonzo centerpiece of Marcus rushing at our heroes is about the only thing in the entire movie that justifies its achronological structure, because I guess we don't get that shock and the gory lead-up to it without the achronological structure that disaggregates them.  And more than "enjoyable camp" Gladys is just a good concept, with witchcraft horror turned more towards action thrills—the final thirty minutes or so are, genuinely, mostly some damned good body snatcher splatter, with a pretty incredible denouement.  (It's a fucking shame that even in the good part Cregger still finds ways to suck, notably a deeply asinine and atonally comic deployment of a potato peeler that screams, "I am a filmmaker of neither judgment nor discernment, who cannot take my job seriously, even when it counts the most.")

If it is still pretty damned good, it's nowhere close to enough to giving the movie a pass—I dislike the movie more than the score I'm going to give it indicates; "actively despising it" would not be inaccurate, and it also occurs to me that part of the reason I'm going as high as I am is that I've been so easy on bad movies from 2025 that it's thrown my calibration off something fierce—but the atmosphere of mystery, however mishandled and squandered, has to be estimated to be worth something; and compared to Barbarian, it at least manages a better order of things, given that that movie is terrible throughout its second half, and Weapons is only terrible in its middle.  I mean, if you can't make a whole movie good, making the ending good is the correct choice, I suppose.

Score: 5/10