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Director Zach Cregger burst out the gate with the 2022 horror thriller Barbarian, a movie that struggled to maintain cohesion after a stellar first half. The announcement that Cregger had another original feature under his belt immediately vaulted it to nearly every critic’s most anticipated lists without knowing anything about it. The end result, the similarly single word title Weapons, may yield a bigger A-list cast but still suffers from a lack of narrative structure. At times coming off more like a pitch for a novel or a miniseries, Weapons gets smothered by the weight of its own construction, focused so much on populating the frame with characters to the detriment of a story that makes sense.

Weapons is a modern day fairy tale/camp fire story/urban legend. As the child narrator says at the beginning, “A lot of people die in really weird ways in this story” and they aren’t kidding. In the small town of Maybrook, 17 children ran out into the darkness at 2:17 am for reasons unknown. The townsfolk, led by Archer Graff (Josh Brolin)—one of the fathers of the missing kids—blames the children’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) as her class was the only one affected. Justine and Archer, on their own separate trajectories, will try to figure out what happened to the Maybrook 17, and the darkness that lies within the town itself.

There is a fascinating horror movie somewhere within Weapons and it shines when it just allows itself to be creepy. There’s a lot of similarities to Stephen King’s It—right down to its clownish, ginger-haired villain—and it’s when Cregger emphasizes the spooky elements that the audience is drawn in. And that’s helped by a game cast that isn’t afraid to play with both the external fears in the narrative as well as their character’s own personal flaws.

After a few misfires unworthy of her talents earlier this year, Julia Garner finally gets a role where she can give a dynamite performance. Justine Gandy is a woman fueled by guilt, not just about her students disappearing but about her alcoholism. The way shame flits across Garner’s eyes when traveling to a liquor store hits all the right notes. Josh Brolin also sells the role of a father uninterested in grieving but desperate to find answers. It takes a fair amount of time for the pair to finally team up, but once they do it elevates the third act. Unfortunately, Garner’s character is the primary focus, leaving Brolin’s Archer mired in the committed father role. It’s interesting that he is the figure teaming up with Justine by the end as he doesn’t register in much of the narrative before or after outside of stray scenes. Alden Ehrenreich’s police officer Paul has more screen time than him.

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There’s a novelistic quality to Weapons, from the extensive narration laying out the dynamics of the town, to the multiple chapter headings that give us each individual character’s POV. This results in a lot of repetition as the viewer watches events happen from Justine’s perspective, and then shows portions of that same event from another character’s perspective, like Paul’s hooking up with her. At over two hours it becomes cumbersome watching the same scenes play out in different ways, particularly Paul’s interactions with a homeless junkie (a memorable Austin Abrams). And whatever divergences to the story don’t necessarily add in character depth but yield further exposition to ultimately make sense of the big bad, played expertly by Amy Madigan.

Weapons is at its best when it leans into the central question: what happened to the Maybrook 17? Where did they go and why? There are only two roads to take when penning a script around a mysterious query like that. The story can either attempt to answer it definitively, crafting a world that sets up and answers the why. Or you tell the viewer just enough and leave them with enough ambiguous strings to spend their days positing their own theories. Cregger goes for a third option which is answer the conceit with just enough world building to say it’s solved, and leave more frustrating plot holes that make you wonder why a stray line of dialogue wasn’t added here or there to clean things up.

It is Madigan, as Aunt Gladys, who blows everyone out of the water with a big, showy performance that can feel a little too Pennywise-adjacent at times. Cregger falls back on a similar reveal as Barbarian in that old hags are always the problem. (If he does one more of these types of movies we could say he’s singlehandedly bringing back hagsploitation.) Madigan is utterly haunting and, had the movie been done in chronological order it’d have been great watch that character build throughout the narrative instead of coming in like a garish wrecking ball. She immediately alerts the audience that SHE, and she alone, is the cause of what’s happening. Her scenes opposite young Cary Christopher as Alex are the perfect children’s fairy tale interactions.

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But the introduction of the central villain in the 11th hour only shows the fractures in the narrative. The audience spends more time asking about the “how” because what happened to the Maybrook 17 and deconstructing character reactions. A woman pops up dressed like a Halloween character, acting completely at odds with the situation and the cops don’t bat an eye? At least in IT there’s an explanation about the evil permeating Derry’s adults and making them turn away. At one point, Alex’s dad says no one is sure if Aunt Gladys is even family….yet they let her stay in their house? Because the world in which we’re seeing isn’t focused on these character these decisions just play out as dumb.

Weapons continues to build on Zach Cregger’s mystique and is another decent horror entry, if you don’t think about it for a millisecond more than you should. The narrative structure affects the pacing, and the third act is messy, but the performances are undeniable particularly Amy Madigan. Seriously, give the woman an award. Any award!

Weapons is in theaters Friday.

Grade: C

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