Weapons is a horror film written and directed by Zach Cregger (Barbarian) and is about how a classroom of children all go missing in the middle of the night after running out of their houses, never to be seen again.
This film was getting a lot of attention when it was released. We kept seeing “100% on Rotten Tomatoes” and went in blind so that we could get the most objective opinion on this possible. Seeing 100% on Rotten Tomatoes is typically a red flag. The film stars Julia Garner (Wolf Man, Apartment 7A) who plays a school teacher named Justine. Justine isn’t just any teacher. She is the teacher of the classroom of children that all went missing. Just her classroom.
This is kind of where things get a bit muddy with the writing. All of the parents of the missing children accuse Justine of having something to do with the children disappearing, which doesn’t really make any sense. They investigated her and found nothing. And the kids all went running out of their houses at the same time on the same evening. Some of them were caught by Ring cameras. You would think that some of the other houses would have seen them running on cameras, but we digress. So that was the first problem we had with it. Also, why were the parents not responsible?
The second issue we had was that there was one child, Alex (Cary Christopher), in her classroom who didn’t disappear. When Justine tries to talk to him she doesn’t get anywhere. The school asks her to back off, and she doesn’t. The principal tells her to leave the kid alone, so instead she stalks him, follows him home, and then watches his house. She even goes up to it and tries to look into his windows. It just seems like the exact opposite of what someone would do if the entire town thinks you may have had the rest of your classroom vanish, and your boss telling you to specifically not do that.
So, beyond that, the film somewhat drags on for a while while they try to find out what happened to the missing children. The school calls to have Alex’s parents in, but his aunt shows up instead. This is when we are introduced to Gladys (Amy Madigan). Gladys informs the principal that the parents can’t be present. Things kind of spiral from there as you find out a lot more about Gladys and the reason the children are missing.
Without spoiling the important parts of the film, we just think that there were too many plot holes to forgive when it comes to Weapons. For some reason Josh Brolin is also randomly in this as one of the parents of the missing children and is working alongside Justine to find answers. He seems out of place in this for some reason. We also want to note that there weren’t all that many scenes that built up tension. There was one really good one where Justine is sleeping in her car outside Alex’s house (where she isn’t supposed to be) and something happens. The storyline with Gladys was a great concept, but the execution was a bit lackluster. The ending also was really goofy and just ruined what could have been some good closure.
Overall, Weapons was kind of a letdown. We don’t know what those people on Rotten Tomatoes saw, but it definitely wasn’t the same thing we saw. For a running time of just over 2 hours, they really could have done better.
