Just Saw “Weapons” and I Did Not Like It

Y’all.

I don’t blog about films, but I just got through watching the highly anticipated horror film, “Weapons” and I need to talk about it, because…. what did I just watch?

SPOILERS AHEAD, if you have not seen the film. You’ve been warned.

This movie was such an unbelievable case of false advertising.

I got the same ads you all did, the trailers where the voice of a young child tells you how one night, seventeen children all walked right out their front doors and disappeared….

……never to be seen again.

Now, if you’ve seen the movie all the way through, you know… that was a lie.

The kids are very much seen again. At the end of the film, in fact.

As well as various times throughout!

I’m not a horror film buff, but I’d heard whispers that one of my favorite directors, Jordan Peele, lost a bidding war for this script, so I HAD to check it out.

The man I consider the modern master of all things horror, wanted THIS script, and LOST it?

I have to see it. Point blank period. It must be amazing if THE Jordan Peele wanted it.

Right? WRONG.

I don’t know what happened between Monkeypaw Productions losing the bidding war and New Line winning and actually premiering the film, but what we ended up with, cannot be anything close to what Jordan Peele wanted when he envisioned producing a film based on this script.

I’m not going to sit here and summarize the plot for you, but I will say that calling it a horror film and marketing it as such does the audience and the film a major disservice.

“Weapons” has no clue what it wants to be.

It seems to want to be several things.

The film is hilarious. I laughed way more times than I jumped, screamed, or held my breath in suspense.

Thing is, I don’t want that to happen when I’m being sold a horror film experience.

In the trailers, you’re shown several things that give horror:

• children running, as if possessed, with their arms rigid and outstretched.

• a child with what appears to be a clown face, smiling creepily in a darkened classroom.

• shattered windows, visceral screams, blood, typical horror film fare.

70 percent of the film is not that.

And that’s fine…. if you’re not selling the film as an all out shriek-inducing horror.

But I guess marketing it as what it is: a mystery/thriller comedy with some occult elements that don’t really get to cook until the third act which takes way too long to reach…. doesn’t sell as many tickets.

After seeing it, this movie was a gigantic cluster mess of things that appear to want deeper analysis, but… really don’t.

because when you look behind the veil, there just isn’t much there.

And the messaging/themes that are there? Super in-your-face and on the nose.

HOW on the nose, you may ask?

There is a dream scene where, I kid you not, a character looks up in the dark and sees a gigantic AR-15 (or a shadow-cloud? in an OBVIOUS AR-15 shape) just hanging out, floating above them.

Ahhhhh. I get it. AR-15s are often used to massacre children at school. School shooting parallels. I get it.

BOOM. WEAPONS.

That was probably the most egregious example of just plain, on-the-nose commentary.

It was not subtle. It looks like a mistake made in post/editing.

It plays like they made a totally different film but at the last second, wanted to add a reference to gun violence in schools and that was the best they could do on a time crunch.

But what really gets me, is that it doesn’t go much deeper than that.

I mean, the film’s premise is 17 kids who are in the same class at school voluntarily leave their homes and disappear in the middle of the night/early morning.

No one knows why they left or where they’ve gone.

There’s some imagery throughout the film that could plausibly apply to school shootings, but the film isn’t brave enough to use its actual story, characters, or dialogue to explore that.

So… let’s stick a big gun into one of the scenes, and that’ll be enough to make them get it, right?

That’s Weapons.

The film that wants the credit for being about school shootings but is too scared to broach the topic in any substantive way.

BUT THERE’S MORE, BECAUSE GUYS, THIS ISN’T REALLY A HORROR FILM, IT’S A COMEDY IN DISGUISE!

The best character, in my opinion, is a drug addict named James.

(side note: most of the characters have biblical names because, I don’t know, that’s horror, I guess?)

Anyway, James gets possessed by the witch and while getting beaten by another character, just REFUSES to die.

(omg you guys, I forgot to mention there’s a witch, but I’ll get to that part in a minute)

Josh Brolin, who plays a character named Archer- (hunting reference? Another veiled gun-thing?) gets his hero moment and fights off the possessed drug addict and I think he knocks this dude out about… 6 or 7 times.

And James keeps getting up!

I don’t know exactly how many times James’ possessed body jolts back up after being on the receiving end of violence that definitely should’ve killed him, but this half-corpse crackhead just will. not. die.

It was hilarious.

I could not stop laughing, but guys…. nothing in the trailer led me to believe this had buddy comedy/home alone vibes.

But that’s how it felt.

It was like, slapstick comedy the way poor Archer (who was in the midst of fighting for his child’s life by the way) had to get this possessed man off of him.

And I’m dying laughing, right? Because it’s funny!

Any time someone gets hit and stands back up, just to get hit again, after about 3 times, it’s funny.

But after the sixth time it becomes so absurdly funny… that I stop caring about Archer or his son, or poor Julia Garner getting choked out in the other room by her possessed cop ex boyfriend/married friend-with-benefits.

And that choice doesn’t seem intentional.

And if it is intentional, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In a horror film, do you want your audience to be laughing so hard that your characters and plot stop meaning anything to them?

Because if that was the goal, congrats, Weapons.

I honestly wanted more comedy afterward, which isn’t a crime in itself, but I have to wonder if I should leave a horror film wanting to laugh more.

Now let me get to this freaking witch part.

Spoiler: So… the person who disappeared the kids… is a witch.

Groundbreaking.

She’s a witch in every obvious sense except she doesn’t have a hat and broomstick.

(and I know I’m butchering and bastardizing witch/wicca culture, I’m sorry. but this film respected witches even less. Be mad at them, not me)

Do the trailers for Weapons give you any sense that a Tim Burton-ized hansel and gretel witch is gonna be the primary antagonist?

I mean, I recall seeing a creepy looking woman in one of the trailers, but as the main villain? No.

She looked too obvious, I figured she had to be a red herring, but no. She’s the culprit.

I wanted something more mysterious or creative, not the female version of Nicolas Cage from Longlegs.

AND what’s worse? She wasn’t even a competent witch!

(and the film tries to imply that she’s also a parasite? but she’s mainly a witch. A witch with parasite tendencies, or something, I don’t know.)

We learn later that the witch snuck into the family of the one boy in the class who didn’t disappear like his fellow classmates.

Should’ve been obvious that the one child who didn’t disappear probably knew something about the disappearances.

But the in-film police didn’t see fit to further traumatize the child even though it would 100 percent help them solve the case.

(Incompetent police? probably the most true-to-life part of the film, I’ll give it that.)

Anyway this witch snuck into the boy’s family by claiming to be a distant aunt.

His mother allowed her to stay with the family, though she hadn’t seen this particular family member in years and her son had no clue what she looked like.

When they take the aunt in, she first presents as a sickly, dying woman UNTIL she possesses the boy’s parents, sucking their life force until they’re little more than husks, unable to communicate with or recognize their own son.

Anyway the alleged “aunt” puts on gaudy earrings, and makeup, telling her “nephew” that she’s basically the one in charge now.

And if he doesn’t obey her every rule, she’ll make his parents eat each other.

The boy essentially becomes her slave, and she becomes weak again, requesting that he bring items belonging to his classmates from school to her, so she can perform spells that will draw the children near, so she can feast on them.

Or imprison their souls, mind control them, steal their youth?

(It’s never fully explained why she does this, what she is, how she got her powers or how her magic works)

Where I get confused with the witch as an addition to the story:

1.) she was going OUTSIDE FREQUENTLY, and in the most garish outfits, makeup, and hair. Anyone who saw her, would probably think she was at least partially responsible for the strange happenings in the town.

2.) She was so eccentric and silly that as a main antagonist, she never felt totally intimidating or powerful enough to be truly threatening.

and 3.) (probably the most fatal, on her part) She would perform her spells IN FRONT OF her “nephew,” or at least in plain view of him.

He then turned one of her spells, BACK ON HER, causing the children she cursed to chase after her and, quite graphically, tear her to shreds. (a scene that should be horrifying, but is also played for laughs)

The solution being so simple and the mystery being so easily preventable made the ending and honestly the whole film, anticlimactic.

She was a terrible witch. Awful at her job. 0/10 witchery.

-sigh- I’m forgetting many aspects of the film that I didn’t like, but consider this an appetizer.

And I’m hating HARD, I realize that, but it’s only because I respect cinema, and I respect audiences.

This film was marketed very deceptively.

What would be the harm in playing up the humor in the trailers so people know what they’ll be watching?

If you saw a trailer for an all out, scary, horror film, and ended up watching Rocky Horror Picture Show, would you not be disappointed?

And Rocky Horror is a personal favorite of mine, but if it were sold to me as an actual horror film, I’d probably have hated it.

After seeing this, I wish we had gotten to see what Jordan Peele would’ve done. He knows how to balance humor with horror, without losing the horror. And Weapons loses a lot of the horror, in my opinion.

Weapons is 2/3 thriller, 1/3 comedy GOLD. But that 1/3 steals the film, and knowing that, it’s incredibly dishonest to market the film as a horror film on par with The Exorcist.

-And now I’m gonna throw in some race related criticism of why I feel this film is being marketed dishonestly and if you’re white and don’t want to hear it, this is your chance to leave:

I’m already seeing people praise this film on a level that it does not deserve, at least as far as the contemporary horror genre goes.

I don’t know if influencers/critics are being paid to praise and hype this movie, maybe bots are involved, but having seen it with my own eyes, the reviews aren’t aligning with the experience.

“This film is better than Sinners!”

“Weapons is right up there with Get Out as a modern horror masterpiece!”

First off, comparison is the thief of joy, and I do find it interesting that it’s just come out and everyone is excited for it to surpass Sinners.

Provided it does make more money at the box office, it has NOTHING to do with merit and everything to do with it appealing to a demographic that’ll give any film 5 stars as long as it makes them laugh or provides good meme material.

But that does not a good horror film make.

To put Weapons and Sinners anywhere near each other as far as serious storytelling goes is an insult to Sinners.

I think some people are overhyping this particular film, because Black filmmakers are becoming more prominent in the modern horror cinema world, and they want to stop it.

I think Hollywood wants to humble those filmmakers.

To remind them: Anything you do well, there’s a white person we’ll convince people they should support instead.

Any accolade you receive, cannot exist without a white version, white input and white audience approval.

The success of Sinners was such a “shock” to many, and was met with extreme confusion among white audiences/publications, but it succeeded nonetheless.

And when that happens, participation trophies tend to get handed to the other side.

Loosely related example:

Beyonce was winning too many awards for her country music album, so moving forward, the Grammys decided to split the country music category into two:

Contemporary and Traditional.

Black and white.

You can just say Sinners was a masterpiece without putting a weaker film next to it because you feel like Sinners needs a white companion film to be valid.

It doesn’t.

A score of anything higher than a 5/10 in the HORROR genre for Weapons is yet another participation trophy for whiteness, because when Black art exceeds expectations, they have to lower the standard.

Black acclaim is never allowed to have its own moment.

All of this to say, I didn’t like Weapons as a horror film, so if you go in expecting horror, EXPECT…. to be disappointed.

And before you say it, I’ll say it for you..

No. I’m not fun at parties.

-Hayley Armstrong