Weapons (2025)

Watched 8/7/25 (theater)

I do not think this movie can cash all of the checks it writes. The third act has a lot of very labored, and often very fun setup to live up to. The smartypants script is written by Zach Cregger of Barbarian fame, who also directs. He uses the same split, anthology-style narrative to tell a story of mysteries, reveals, and some humor sprinkled in. That’s it. There’s no character development. No one discovers anything about themselves. There are few action setpieces to break up the atmospheric mystery that slowly drips its bloody clues over soft, pale skin. There’s really only one trick up Weapons’ sleeve and that’s its structure. But man it’s still a darn solid, oft-original ride getting there.

It’s not the most original thing you’ve ever seen. The suburban horror drama was revolutionized by Stephen King and many followers. And kids in peril has been a tried and true winner from Spielberg to Stranger Things. But this movie just stirs so many other magnetic actors into the pot, with such a gripping mystery at its core and such a control of tone, that you can’t help but feel like it’s something you haven’t seen before.

The central conceit of 17 kids from the same 3rd-grade class vanishing in the middle of the night IS a truly new, one-of-a-kind slant. And that’s all exposed economically and with great attention to the grief such an event would cause. That grief is felt in the strongest degree by Josh Brolin’s Archer Graff and Julia Garner’s Justine Gandy, a parent and teacher to missing children, respectively. I’ll call these the leads as they take up the bulk of the story, and they’re so damn watchable, both because of the actors’ steely gazes and the writer/director’s balance of heart and humor, that even though they never really grow, they are more than reliable when it comes to keeping you locked in. Even when Weapons is at its most depraved, or when it reaches its most uninspired conclusions, these two leads are there to fall back on. They just have that movie star thing.

A gallimaufry of other characters headline Cregger’s latest—he’s assembled talent across the board. Benedict Wong and Amy Madigan absolutely rock in some instantly iconic horror-forward sequences…they’re naturals. And for a while, Alden Ehrenreich and Austin Abrams steal the show as this love/hate cop/robber duo. There are some scary, funny, then scary-again dynamics go on here that really just work. Madigan in particular though was the absolutely transcendent surprise for me, though, and that’s great because I can’t remember the last time I have seen her in anything.

There is so much setup in the opening forty-five minutes, mostly paid off in little here-and-there perspective shifts whenever the script moves to other characters and replays similar events. These are somewhat cheap thrills, but they are worthy of audience smiles and sometimes even full-on laughs or full-on “ohhhhhs.” And that’s worth something, to keep an audience as engaged as mine was (that includes me—I got a lot of enjoyment out of this). The fact that Cregger is able to sustain this constant dread in the background of all these exciting character interactions is where the magic happens.

Where I struggle to be satisfied is in the third act. The movie introduces so many characters AND so many defining characteristics for these characters. As such, since you’re given so much insight into their psyches, you expect them to grow as characters, whether they come to an epiphany or slip deeper into their own personalities. Alas, that just doesn’t happen. Characters either die or solve the mystery, that’s it. What further irked me is an extremely dramatic setup with the most throat-grabbing image of the movie that was simply never paid off in the end. Instead, I came to realize it as the movie’s one moment of ham-fisted metaphor. And of course it takes place in a dream sequence, which makes it feel like even more of a weird cheat in a movie otherwise obsessed with connecting dots.

This is a tough one to write about without giving away too much, so I’ll compare it to Cregger’s last feature, Barbarian, which in this writer’s opinion is far superior and far less ambitious. I will note, before I forget, that both movies really slickly play out their extreme violence in some really cinematic ways. And the camera moves incredibly in both stories, slinking from basements to caul-de-sacs to water towers without a hint of showiness. The showiness is there, Cregger knows where to put that camera and when to move it—he’s just so good at it that you don’t even notice. I don’t really know how to explain it he just has so much else going on in each frame that, much like Spielberg, annoyance with camera movements doesn’t even come to mind.

So Barbarian really worked because it was on such a b-line. It had that same fractured storyline, yes, but it all tied back to one house and one villain and one big twist without giving you nearly as much backstory outside of Justin Long’s character, who even in backstory is really just there for comedic relief and later on some satisfying payoff. The tricky part with Weapons is that there’s so much backstory to cover before you get to the action. It never feels boring, it just sets up so much with its characters and their flaws that when those flaws go unaddressed in the third act it kind of feels like you were setup for no reason. Barbarian does not go for nearly as much and reaps its smaller rewards to the highest degree. Crucially, Barbarian only introduced character flaws that played into its movie’s final confrontation. Weapons introduced some extraneous ones—for example, one character is an alcoholic who cheats on his girlfriend and another is a stoner who just wants to beat the system and score some cash. Those defining traits not mattering to the third act does unfortunately cause Weapons’ final cut to black to come off as a bit abrupt.

But it’s hard to say that I’m disappointed. This was such a swing for the fences and at a runtime of 2 hours and 9 minutes, a truly impressive feat of economical, large-scope writing and all-encompassing atmosphere. There’s some truly upsetting stuff sprinkled into all of the original plotting and characters—and that’s huge for a horror flick. Not many scary movies touch all of those marks. The acting is perfect. The characters are solid until that third act. The neighborhood is memorable. There is some arresting imagery on display. I just wish the sky fully lit up with all of the fireworks Cregger’s trying to set off.

7.75/10