What’s It About

When all but one child from the same classroom mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Zach Cregger’s new horror movie “Weapons” starts off really strong but crashes hard after the first hour. This film had all the potential to become one of the year’s best scary movies, but it totally wastes that chance by making some seriously bad choices. The story kicks off with a creepy setup that actually works. Picture this: seventeen kids wake up at exactly 2:17 in the morning, run outside into the dark streets, and disappear forever. Gone without a trace. The whole town goes wild trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, everyone blames the teacher, Justine Gandy, played by Julia Garner. She’s the only adult who was supposed to be watching these kids, so obviously it must be her fault, right? Julia Garner does amazing work as Justine. She brings this character to life as someone who’s dealing with guilt, alcoholism, and the weight of losing her entire class except for one weird kid named Alex. Garner makes you feel every bit of shame and pain that Justine carries around. When she goes to buy alcohol, you can see the embarrassment in her eyes. It’s the kind of performance that makes you wish the whole movie was just about her. Josh Brolin plays Archer, one of the angry dads who lost his kid. He’s obsessed with finding answers and refuses to just grieve like a normal person. Brolin sells this role well, showing us a guy who would rather be angry than sad. The problem is that the movie doesn’t give him enough screen time to really develop his character properly. For the first hour, everything feels genuinely scary and mysterious. The film has this great small-town horror vibe where everyone’s paranoid and nobody knows who to trust. There’s real tension here, real fear, and you actually care about finding out what happened to those missing kids. The movie builds this atmosphere where you feel like something terrible is lurking just beneath the surface of this normal-looking suburb. But then everything goes wrong. Around the sixty-minute mark, the film completely changes direction and starts explaining everything in boring detail. Instead of letting us wonder and worry, it spoon-feeds us information we don’t need about characters who don’t matter. The movie tries to copy “Pulp Fiction” by jumping between different people’s stories, but these characters barely connect to the main plot. The storytelling becomes a total mess. I feel like the movie is just teasing us with the same flashbacks again and again, slowly suffocating us with watching the same scenes over and over again. The scenes become stale. The film lasts for over two hours, and it felt like we spent most of the film on superfluous backstory and explanations that were unnecessary and added nothing of value. Once we get to the reveal of what happened to the kids, I feel completely let down. I won’t spoil it, but – spoiler alert – it makes an old woman named Aunt Gladys who looks and acts like a bad caricature of a cartoon villain. This character is played by Amy Madigan, and she plays the role to the hilt, but it feels like another cheap copy of Pennywise from “It.” She shows up way too late in the movie, acting completely crazy while all the adults around her just ignore the obvious red flags. The explanation for why the kids disappeared makes no sense at all. The movie never clearly explains how keeping children in a basement somehow makes this villain healthy again. It’s as if the filmmakers had a great idea for the beginning, but struggled to find a fitting conclusion. They leave so many plot holes that you’ll spend more time being confused than scared. What really hurts the film is how it abandons the serious tone it started with. The second half becomes weirdly funny in all the wrong ways, with over-the-top violence that’s supposed to make you laugh instead of scream. People die in ridiculous ways, and the movie seems to think this is hilarious rather than horrifying. It’s like watching two completely different films smashed together. The movie also ignores basic common sense. In reality, if seventeen kids just disappeared, the town would be inundated with FBI agents, reporters, and detectives from other states. But not here. The cops abandon it after a few months, and then you have to put it together, BACK and the angry dad store. It remains so outrageous, you are forced out of the story. Cregger clearly has talent for creating creepy atmospheres and building tension, but he doesn’t know when to stop explaining things. Horror works best when you don’t understand everything, when there’s still mystery left to scare you. This movie explains way too much and ruins all the fear it built up in the beginning. The film intends to tackle earnest subjects like school shootings, child abuse, and how adults fail to protect kids. Unfortunately, the film screws its attempt to examine serious themes in a significant way; the message is buried under cartoonish violence and kooky humor. You are left to wonder, by the end, if it was aiming to be a serious drama or a stupid horror/comedy. “Weapons” had the potential to be something spectacular. The first hour proves that Cregger knows how to make genuinely frightening cinema when he focuses on character and atmosphere instead of trying to show off with complicated plots and gross-out humor. Julia Garner’s performance alone makes parts of this movie worth watching. Unfortunately, this film shoots itself in the foot by trying to be too many things at once. Save your money and skip this one. The trailer probably shows you all the good parts anyway.

OUR RATING – A SMALL TOWN 2

MEDIA

• Genre – Thriller
• Street date
• Digital – September 9, 2025
• 4K/Blu-Ray/DVD – October 14, 2025
• Video – 1080p
• Screen size – 2.39:1
• Sound – English: Dolby Atmos, English: Dolby TrueHD 7.1, French: Dolby Digital 5.1, Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1, English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1, Audio descriptive
• Subtitles – English SDH, French SDH, Spanish

Extras

• Director Zach Cregger: Making Horror Personal (HD 6:15) 
• Weaponized: The Cast of Weapons (HD 8:53)
• Weapons: Texture of Terror (HD 6:49)