Weapons

• Directed, Written, Produced, and Co-Scored by Zach Cregger
• August 8, 2025

A group of children from the same classroom vanish mysteriously one night.

Listening to the buzz surrounding Weapons I expected something frightening that was also a bit more than scares since it features Josh Brolin. It is well directed and aims for atmosphere from the outset implying something sophisticated. What it delivers though is stupidity on par with your basic slasher. Nothing that puts characters in constant danger but poor decision making that creates a collection of problems that should not occur if a modicum of intelligence was engaged.

Elementary school teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) whose class has vanished is being accused of involvement with the disappearance. During a schoolboard meeting it is clear because of the blame she is in danger so what does she do? Go into hiding? Rent a room? Nope. Returns home. This bit of idiocy was a herald of the weakness to come from the film.

Gandy’s initial dialogue did little to make her a sympathetic character whose existence mattered. She reminded me of every millennial with a chip on their shoulder with the words making her come off as a bit self-centered. Openly hostile with her concerns of the children about focusing on how it made her look and not over their safety.

That character made just about every stupid decision she could which made her look more suspicious. Such good ideas like sleeping with her married police officer ex Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) AFTER the incident and doing nothing to conceal getting drunk and getting it on. Stupid AND a terrible person that does not care about her issues. I don’t need my characters to be upstanding or perfect but the longer she’s on the screen, the less of a likable person she is.

She has no reason to suspect anyone that appears to be helping her is against her, but she snaps at them as if they’ve personally wronged her. Paul may want booty, but he is not coming across as, well, cross. Yet she lashes out at him while at the bar. Her boss Marcus (Benedict Wong) gets anger even though he is trying to help her.

Construction foreman and father Archer (Josh Brolin) is more understandable and likeable because he reacts intelligently and logically. Yes, he wrongly accused Justine but given the situation and what he learned about her past he was drawing plausible conclusions. She had issues that made employing her probably questionable. More importantly, he didn’t hold onto the anger when confronted with newer information. He didn’t completely drop it and become best buds with Gandy but he did understand she was not to blame or not entirely to blame.

Director, writer, producer, and co-scorer Zach Cregger uses a nonlinear narrative in Weapons. The story advances and then goes back to show us from a different perspective how things got to a particular point. Done right a non-linear narrative can be intriguing for the correct movie but I don’t think this is the right movie for that. It’s supposed to be a horror yet any time things get weird or creepy or disturbing the story jumps back to the past undoing all that.

The advancing and then circling back certainly stretches this movie out. It’s a little over two hours and with all the talking and the rehashing it can feel like it. There can be only so many flashbacks before it becomes repetitive. Everything doesn’t need to be a flashback because doing so hands every detail to the audience. If you must do that then you are a bad storyteller. We do not need to see how Marcus went crazy. It is enough to know he did because we know it is connected to the issue with the kids.

Alex (Cary Christopher) is the only child in Miss Gandy’s class not to vanish. Things get interesting when we get to the story from his perspective. He is not a child character that acts too adult but one that reacts as one might think or expect a elementary age kid would. When it comes down to it he is the ultimate hero. He has seen enough to be able to do something that helps end things. A movie about him might have been truly unsettling.

When Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) was on the screen she was genuinely threatening. I was todays years old when I found out it was Amy Madigan. Gladys had that false kindness and control and the actress could turn that on a dime into something genuinely threatening. Credit to Madigan on that, and she should’ve probably been in more the movie, but the continual looping back muted her evil.

When you lay the movie out in a linear fashion as several sites have or one can do in their own head, it is rather boring. The idea is not bad but its execution most certainly is. Weapons is a movie with a hook and not a good story. Given all the elements I knew of before watching I thought present were the ingredients here for something truly shocking and frightening. I went in expecting adequacy if not greatness based on the hype and what I knew. I finished the film disappointed. Not only was I not scared, but I didn’t know who the main character was. It certainly looked like it was going to be Justine Gandy, but she got sidelined for producer Josh Brolin’s Archer to finish the film carrying his child. The final scene is general demonstrative of the central figure or figures.

There is good acting with some understandable character motivations yet despite plenty of ingredients for a very good film Weapons fails to reach that. It is too long and too boring with a narrative gimmick that wrecks the horror aspect. A significantly underwhelming experience.