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Weapons, starring Julia Garner and Josh Brolin, directed by Zach Cregger
Trailer: Warner Bros.

Weapons
Directed by Zach Cregger
Rated R
Captive 8 August 2025
#WeaponsMovie

Weapons is a well-told pile of rubbish.

Maybrook, Penn.

This movie that ends with a fair amount of gore accompanied by a greater amount of audience glee starts off quietly. It’s such a quiet start, the soft, whispered voice of an unseen little girl providing a whole lot of exposition is at times drowned out by the gentle rustling of the audience still settling into the seats.

The girl asserts it’s a true story (go ahead, chuckle about Fargo). The police have remained silent because they’re embarrassed by their inability to solve the mystery as to how and why 17 grade school students from the same classroom disappeared overnight. Oooh. Intriguing. She talks about a lot of people dying in really weird ways. True dat. At least as far as this movie’s "truthiness" goes.

In traditional terms, it’s a slow-boil kind of movie that blends some interesting drama, good characters, a surprising amount of humor (some of it quite vicious), a little bit of tension and bits of gore that lead to a way over-the-top climactic confrontation with evil.

There’s a lot to enjoy in Weapons, which is an odd thing to say about a movie being popularly classified as a horror flick. In a way, it’s a throwback to ‘80s horror-comedy mash-ups like Gremlins and Fright Night. There’s also a smidge (a tiny smidge) of The Shining. But, as the story unfolds and the source of the creepiness starts to reveal itself, there’s also a sense of disappointment. Things start to go the way of last year’s Longlegs, the widely praised movie from writer-director Osgood Perkins that featured an overrated performance from Nicolas Cage.

Creepiness is a key word as the tranquility of suburbia takes a dark turn, but the big reveal lacks any credibility. There’s virtually no grounding in reality, which is a basic necessity in effective horror.

All of that makes for a great movie that turns into a whole bunch of nonsense.

Fathers of the Disappeared

The mystery begins with an elementary classroom of 18. One day, only one of the students shows up for class. The other 17 disappeared in the middle of the night, precisely at the crack of 2:17. Rummage through the Bible if you want, scouring all chapters 2 and verses 17. There are more interesting things to do in life, though, and more important things in the Bible.

The kids are seen on door cams running across the street and into the darkness, their arms curiously stretched out straight at their sides.

Their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, The Fantastic Four: First Steps), is a top suspect among the parents. She’s a known drunk and she’s been accused of being "inappropriate" with her students. What does that mean? It means she consoled a child in tears. It means she gave a ride home to a student who missed the bus. And, with 17/18 of her class gone missing, she’s become the leading pariah of Maybrook. She (or at least her car) has been branded a "witch."

Part of the cleverness afoot in Weapons, though, is she’s not the only suspect. Others are far less obvious. There’s Archer Graff (Josh Brolin, Avengers: Endgame), the father of Matthew, one of the missing kids who, in turn, turns out to be a bit of a bully. Like father, like son. Suspicious red paint’s found in the bed of Archer’s pick-up.

And there’s Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, Oppenheimer), a Maybrook police officer, who shows up one day with a strange finger wound. Like other Maybrook citizens, he’s deeply flawed as he grapples with fidelity and sobriety issues.

Devilish Details

Without question, writer-director Zach Cregger is a talented filmmaker. Having made a big splash in horror with Barbarian and now Weapons, there is finally reason to believe Resident Evil will actually get a decent movie adaptation next year with Cregger at the helm.

As a rising talent, Cregger’s also been able to attract a great cast to Weapons. And that includes what didn’t happen in casting. Pedro Pascal, rapidly becoming overexposed, reportedly had to step aside, paving way for Brolin to tackle the role of Archer. Brolin’s quite good as the angry bullying father of a bully ensnared in the disappearance.

The titular "weapons" are conspicuously absent until – in a nightmare – Archer sees a giant rifle hovering above a house with 2:17 flashing in red on the rifle barrel. But it’s all a ruse. The titular "weapons" refers to the weaponization of people. Which is a timely notion, given the social climate and the weaponization of virtually everything. These days, a relatively simple disagreement or differing point of view can escalate into a hot war.

The devil is in the details as Cregger backs up and tells the story from individual points of view. It's a great structure, a different way to present information to viewers. But it’s also a structure pleading for an equally solid landing. In that regard, Weapons doesn’t "stick it."

First, there’s Justine’s story. That’s followed by Archer’s point of view, then Paul’s. There are also the experiences of a school principal and the antics of a drug addict. An angry father. A drunk teacher. An unfaithful cop. A drug addict. A school principal.

And then there’s Gladys, the creepy (so creepy) aunt of the sole surviving child, Alex. In a stunning example of casting against type, the old woman with a clownlike application of far too much makeup is played by Amy Madigan (Field of Dreams). Her casting, her role and her performance all add to the parallels with Longlegs.

It’s around the time the antics of the druggie are revealed the question is raised: Where the heck is all of this going? Weapons starts to feel a little tedious as all the tangents – often front-loaded with humor – run their course and the main story of missing children and their horrifying disappearance is seemingly set aside.

But it’s during the druggie’s tale of woe when the pieces finally start to fall into place.

The Horror

While Weapons is being marketed as a horror movie, it’s really a horror-comedy. And, for better or worse, the comedy aspects are much more effective than the horror. It’s probably better described as a gory comedy.

Weirdness for the sake of weirdness was the rarified turf of David Lynch. But he piled on layers, "textures" that gave the strange an uncommon density.

There’s a big problem with modern horror. It’s not scary. And that’s not just the watered-down, mass-appeal cheap thrills of PG-13 horror. It’s across the board, including highly praised recent releases such as Bring Her Back and the previously mentioned Longlegs. Even Drop, which does a great job of playing off the scarier aspects of modern technology, crashes with a tone-deaf conclusion that offers some gore and a lot of missing logic.

The scariest things in the world are the unexplained. That’s partly why the simple scenarios of Halloween (with the Shatner-masked Michael Myers) and Friday the 13th (with the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees) are good with the simplest of scare elements. Once the unexplainable is explained, the knowledge imputes power over that element.

Finding a man dead in a sewer can lead to all sorts of fears of a serial killer or alligators or a swamp thing. But, finding out the person was an imbecile who was too busy staring at his smart(er) phone and fell into an open manhole removes fear from all sensible people. The odds of this author being found in a similar situation are "near zero."

So, pile on the weirdos in clown makeup. Pile on numerology. (In Weapons, 1948 makes a couple conspicuous appearances, as do 2:17 and the traditional number of man (or, in PC terms, the number of "people," 6). They all add to the mystique, certainly. But the ultimate revelation in Weapons is staggeringly silly, not scary.

Regardless of the strangely rousing, crowd-pleasing conclusion, no matter what symbolism might be layered onto the settings and situations, despite the seeming appearance of numerology (particularly the reappearing 1948, 6, and 2:17) to whip people into all sorts of conspiracy theories, there’s a wish the horror was taken more seriously.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.