(This story was originally written January 14th, 2026 and reposted May 30th, 2026)
The hardest type of movie to review is one that is Good Enough. Reviewing a bad movie is easy and cathartic for the reviewer. It gives an opportunity for spleen venting and amateur open mic night shenanigans that are inappropriate anywhere else. Reviewing a great movie is also easy. Basking in artistic greatness is like watching an Olympian set a world record. The reviewer just sits back and says “Wow, that sure was fast.” There’s nothing else that needs to be said.
When a movie is Good Enough, it’s hard. It’s dissatisfying to tell someone that it’s a perfectly good way to spend $15 and two hours. Because of the rising cost of … well, everything, movies have an almost unique pressure that they have to be a spectacle or an artistic triumph. No one is interested in just spending two hours in the theater. If it isn’t worth a screen the size of an airplane hanger or it isn’t showing an actor or director at the pinnacle of their talent, it is considered a failure or worse, a waste of everyone’s time.
Send Help is not a failure. It’s a great two-hand performance from a heralded but underutilized actor (Rachel McAdams) and someone relatively unknown to me (Dylan O’Brien) who was handed a meal of a role and responded with a ham of a performance. It’s a movie directed by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, the Tobey Maguire Spiderman movies) who should be given an annual grant of $15 million to make movies just like this one. It’s a simple premise with enough twists in the story and enough tension between the characters to keep things engaging for two hours. It is a perfectly Good Enough movie.
It also could have been 15% better and that’s frustrating. A script that was slightly more clever, cinematography that was slightly more interesting, effects that were a little less schlocky (which is normally welcome in a Raimi movie but out of place here). I don’t know if it could have been great – it’s not The Godfather and not everything has to be. But when things are Good Enough, you can’t help wishing they were a little better.
The premise is that put-upon office factotum Linda (McAdams) has been promised a senior role at her company when the CEO dies. Fittingly, it’s never made really clear what the company does. They could make rubber nipples or nuclear bombs. It doesn’t matter and that type of nihilism, the desperate struggle to matter at a company that doesn’t seem to, gives a sadness to McAdams’ character. She’s the office annoyance, openly expressing that she’s too good to be sitting in the secretarial pool while she stuffs a tuna fish sandwich in her mouth and misses social cues like a blind three-point shooter. But she does good work and the work is supposed to be what matters. When the CEO’s hotshot son Bradley (O’Brien) takes over and gives her the world’s worst pep talk, it’s patently clear that he finds her so frumpy and off-putting that there’s no chance she will succeed in proving her worth, even as she is promised the opportunity to do so on an overseas trip with the CE-Bro and his cronies.
What no one knows until it is too late is that Linda is a survivalist nut. She’s read literally every book on how to survive in the wild. Why? That’s the 15% room for improvement. Halfway through the movie, Linda gives an exposition dump about her background that could have justified or clarified her character and the premise. But it’s Good Enough to show that she loves the TV show Survivor and reads books about wild mushrooms for fun. But this pays off when the CEO’s plane crashes, leaving Linda and Bradley as the only survivors on a secluded island.
The rest of the movie flirts with pieces of other movies. There’s the power dynamic inversion of Misery, the strange woman and her strange obsessions suddenly having power over a man who is her social superior. There’s the romantic hatred taken to cartoonish extremes of War of the Roses, as Linda and Bradley both try to play sexual tension against each other and then engage in Tom and Jerry or Three Stooges style brawls, where the old Raimi visual language flares up. But the movie lacks the commitment to any of these ideas. It lacks the audacity of War of the Roses, the willingness to go where the audience will gasp not just at what is being shown on screen but at the idea that somewhere, a screenwriter and a director had these ideas rattling around in their head and agreed it was a good idea to put them in a movie.
There are a few moments of graphic … body stuff, that stand in for audacity. There’s a delicate balance between spoiling the few moments where I screamed at the screen in surprise, and protecting people who are triggered by things like blood, vomit, hair pulling, eye gouging, pig fighting, and a grown man being forced to smell another man’s finger. Those moments were great, if upsetting to look at. But they also stand as a disconnect between the story being told and the way it is told. They are graphic in visual only.
Speaking of graphic, I saw this movie in standard 2-D though I believe scenes were filmed in 3-D. Raimi is exactly the kind of director who should be working in an outdated mode like that. His work is perfect for a zombie to pop up and startle the audience. But this isn’t the story for those moments, and in 2-D, the effects looked just plain bad.
All of this said, I enjoyed the movie. I can’t get mad at a movie where a man-child CEO is so convinced that he has all the answers that he constructs a makeshift raft to get away from the only person keeping him alive, steals her coconut-husk coffee mug, and then flips her the double bird just as a huge wave crests behind him. I can’t get mad at McAdams giving Linda, a fairly flat character, so much nuance as she careens from weakness to power, frumpy to island-chic, ending as a character who has no problem flipping a double bird of her own. “Fuck you, Bradley!” should have been the tagline of the movie. And I certainly can’t get mad at someone giving Sam Raimi enough money to make this movie and to let him do his thing.
But it is only Good Enough, and is Good Enough good enough to recommend something that will be lost in the streaming shuffle in six months?
Which leads to Marty Supreme. These two movies are probably not going to get mentioned in the same breath very often. One of them is a January dump movie, the other is a Best Picture contender. Both are made by directors with a distinct voice, but while one is ascendant and lauded, the other hadn’t made a movie with their own voice since 2009. And while one has Rachel McAdams giving a fun performance and elevating her material, the other has Timothée Chalamet.
Chalamet has been nominated for three Academy Awards and at the time of writing, won none. He’s won a few awards for his performances but much like stacking three Bachelor’s Degrees doesn’t equal a Master’s, none of his other awards are an Oscar. The conversation around Marty Supreme has been less about is it a good movie (it is) or a fun movie (it is) but whether or not it will be the movie where Timothée breaks through and wins the big one.
Winning an Academy Award is as much about politics as anything else. Leonardo DiCaprio famously didn’t win one until The Revenant despite being generally acknowledged as the best working actor (male) for long before that. He also hasn’t won since The Revenant, despite that movie fading in relevance much faster than The Wolf of Wall Street, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or The Departed. The conventional wisdom was that DiCaprio had to “earn” it and that meant not recognizing his greatness when it was happening.
Coincidentally, DiCaprio is also up for Best Actor this year for his role as burned out former revolutionary turned stoned dad in One Battle After Another. It’s a role and a movie that purports to have much more to say about the current American condition, whereas Marty Supreme is more about the American Dream. Both are up against Michael B. Jordan in Sinners, which is a role in a movie by the director where all three are typically not acknowledged by the Academy.
I say all this to say that the environment in which a movie is released has as much to say about whether it wins awards as the actual work does, along with whether or not people think the actor has “earned” it. This is a year where Sinners could sweep because it was a triumph of a type that people needed, where a Black filmmaker stuck it to the studio and made his vision his way while holding onto creative control. It’s also a year when One Battle After Another could sweep because of the current fascination with hairy dads on missions to save their biracial daughters amidst an unfocused call to Resist … something. Sean Penn, I suppose.
While all this is happening, Chalamet is engaged in a loud Oscar campaign, openly musing in public about his desire for greatness. It’s a moment of openness in a place where wanting things is seen as unseemly. When athletes say they want to be great and to win awards, we say, well yeah, that’s the point. Get paid, achieve, and win. When actors say they want to be seen as great and to win awards, it seems odd. Daniel Day Lewis would never. Meryl Streep would never. It’s somehow weird for performers to say that they want to be great.
That desire does open the door to whether a performance is Good Enough. And while I keep trying to compare acting accolades to sports, and despite the best efforts of the Ringer, so far there is no WAR for movies. It’s subjective. So in this year’s field, it seems unlikely Wagner Moura will win for Secret Agent. Same for Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon. Perhaps that is unfair of me considering those are the two movies I haven’t seen in this year’s slate, but again, politics, you have to earn it, “no one saw those movies” populism, etc.
That leaves Chalamet’s Marty Supreme, Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke and Stack, and DiCaprio’s hairy dad. Three solid performances that all deserve recognition, meaning it isn’t about the performance being Good Enough. It’s about the other factors.
If I were a betting man, I’d rule out DiCaprio. His performance is great but comedy often doesn’t get the recognition that drama does, and he’s also one hand in a triple or quadruple hand picture. Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro are likely to steal his thunder, along with Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, and even Regina Hall. It’s an ensemble performance led by a director likely to win his own hardware. That and DiCaprio already having won an Oscar make it an uphill climb.
That leaves Chalamet and Jordan. Neither has won, though both have deserved it. Smoke and Stack is an interesting dual performance. I personally didn’t see enough nuance between the two roles to give Jordan credit for doing something technically interesting, but the fact is he did. He was constantly on screen in two places at the same time, doing two different things. It’s a complicated performance in a great movie. However, Sinners is proudly a genre film, with horror again not getting nearly enough recognition most years. If Toni Collette couldn’t win for Hereditary, it feels unfair to give Jordan an award for a vampire movie.
Which finally leaves Chalamet. If movies had most valuable performers, he’d win in a landslide. I think there was maybe one scene in Marty Supreme where he wasn’t on screen, and even that scene referred back to actions he’d taken. The movie simply doesn’t work without Chalamet. There are probably other actors who could do this performance; narcissism is an easy enough quality to portray as far as emotional range goes. But they couldn’t do it as well. And the quality of the cast around Chalamet can mostly be described as “fine.” Not only does Chalamet have to put on a good performance, he has to outweigh the actors around him, some of whom aren’t even real actors (a Safdie Brothers staple.) In sports terms, his win rate has to be 100%.
So here’s Chalamet, putting in the literal shoe leather, running down streets and ping pong courts equally, a physically demanding performance. He’s on screen for the entire film essentially, being the center of the story. He has to make you root for a narcissist who Gwenyth Paltrow is not only willing to sleep with, but willing to sell her jewelry for. He has to grunt and moan on court in multiple settings, whine and cajole, charm and repulse. And he does! The son of a bitch pulls it off. If there’s a similar performance in his repertoire, it’s his whiny student activist in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, where he plays another selfish, entitled, unlikable turd. Except this time, it’s for several hours. The same way keeping a ping pong ball in the air for two hours is impressive but repetitive, the trick Chalamet pulls off is to keep it entertaining and to keep you invested.
Is it Good Enough? Absolutely. More than Good Enough. It’s a great performance where we are watching probably the greatest young actor of his generation ply his trade. The only rival? Michael B. Jordan, who has been so good for so long, I’ve started to forget. But there’s a reason HBO Max still uses Jordan’s picture as teenage hopper Wallace as the photo for The Wire.
Three great performances in three massively successful movies, but each with a flaw out of the actor’s control. Sometimes Good Enough isn’t Good Enough.
(Editor’s Note: At the 2026 Academy Awards, Marty Supreme lost all nine awards it was nominated for. One Battle After Another won six, honoring everyone except DiCaprio and Taylor. Sinners won four, including Jordan winning for Best Actor.)
