Weapons: Loaded With Blanks

 

I should get this out of the way first: I was rooting for Weapons. As someone on the frontlines of defending Director Zach Cregger's 2022 film, Barbarian, I want to make it excruciatingly clear that nothing makes me more excited than the continued success of a fresh, new director, especially as we leave the decade-long-era of theaters being held up by Disney. Barbarian is not a movie without faults, but for every moment it's lacking; it delivers promise tenfold. Cregger's directorial debut is damn good. I'm done apologizing for thinking that.

This brings us to 2025, and Cregger's sophomore solo theatrical release: Weapons. Following a truly astounding and, by all measures, thoroughly captivating marketing campaign, Weapons would be unleashed in theaters on August 8th, 2025. With trailers that seemed to give nothing away and only ever draw audiences in further, a horror premise that, on the surface, could engage American audiences like no other, and a truly monumental string of critical praise, the movie was primed to be a smash hit for Cregger; and it was. Weapons would devour $70 Million in its opening weekend at the global box office, and secure $100 Million as of today, August 15th, 2025.

Weapons has crushed the global opening weekend of 2025’s horror heavy weights: Sinners ($63 Million) and 28 Years Later ($60 Million).

All of this is to say, Weapons did for Cregger what it should’ve done for Cregger, he needed a big movie to follow up on his 2022 release and, with general audiences, managed to stick the landing. Nothing I say can (or really should) damage the film’s (*ahem*) heat-seeking climb towards box office domination, and I wouldn’t really want it to; I think Cregger deserves to continue making movies that resonate with people, even if those “people” are not me.

Now, onto the actual point.

I sat down for weapons in the third row from the bottom of the theater on the 4th day of its theatrical release: the theater was literally still that packed. I’d figured out well prior to the movie’s release that it was very obviously about a school-shooting, at least thematically. So I figured that not only would we be getting a risky-but-at-least-completely-new premise for a horror movie based on something that is actually still terrifying in modern day America, where no one scoffs at exorcisms anymore because the sheer magnitude of God’s absence in American society today would make Nietzsche himself blush, but that it could be genuinely existentially terrifying.

[MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW]

What I got was… not that? Somehow? In the interest of making something avant garde for audiences, Cregger manages to say too much and nothing at all. The movie is about gun violence, but a gun is what Julia Gardner’s Justine Gandy saves herself with in the third act. The movie is allegedly, by Cregger’s own accord, about alcoholism, but alcoholism only ever truly affects a side character to the movie’s B plot, a character no one cares about. The movie is about drug abuse, but the meth abuser in the movie is rendered to comedic relief and quite literally nothing else. The movie is about police brutality, but stops just short of admitting that police brutalize people. 

The only consistency in this movie is how outright fucking hilarious it is, and not in the “I’m so uncomfortable I’m laughing” way, in the genuinely “gut-busting-tears-in-my-eyes” way, and i found it fucking deplorable. This movie marketed itself on the horrors of a school shooting and does nothing to actually meaningfully convey the psychological damage that such events beget. Sure, the town is depressed and disgruntled, the people “affected” by the “shooting” are left in a state of tonic immobility or catatonia, but is this also somehow supposedly the “consequence” of alcoholism? I’ll get back to this, first, exposition.

While the movie is subtextually about a school shooting, it is actually about a child’s (Alex) eccentric aunt who comes to visit him. Aunt Gladys (played incredibly by Amy Madigan) is a witch, who has the ability to control the bodies of anyone she has a personal possession of. Gladys is sick, and for some reason that is never explained, needs children to possibly cure her of her illness. She manipulates Alex into bringing her personal possessions of all of his classmates by forcing his parents to mutilate themselves in front of him. Fearing what Gladys may make his parents do next, Alex complies and brings his Aunt his classmates’ name tags. That night, she uses these possessions to kidnap the children by forcing them to leave their houses in the middle of the night and indefinitely huddle in her basement. 

All the while, Alex’s parents are being held hostage in this hypnotized frozen state (which Gladys at one point humorously describes as “Consumption” (an 18th century term for Tuberculosis)), a constant looming threat that if Alex does not comply, they will continue to be punished. This, somehow, is what Cregger alleges is a metaphor for one’s parents being raging alcoholics. Prior to Gladys' arrival, the parents seem to be genuinely caring, possibly slightly ignorant to the fact that he gets bullied, but nothing suggests that they are wholly negligent or “bad parents” who take to the bottle.

The only person who is depicted as having a negative history of alcoholism is Gardener’s Gandy, who uses the alcohol to escape the pain of having lost her students and being public enemy #1. Her drinking leads her to manipulating an old fling of hers into having sex. Said fling is a recovering alcoholic and cop, currently engaged to another woman. When the other woman does find out, she assaults Gardner and is quite literally never seen again for the rest of the movie. Nothing ever comes of it. The cop, Alden Ehrenreich’s Paul Morgan, is never seen getting back into drinking; it serves as more of a catalyst for his anger issues that lead nowhere, as he dies before anything really consequential becomes of it. 

This movie, I guess makes a point that “anyone who drinks even a little bit is at risk of ruining their entire life” which, I mean okay? Sure? Is that what this movie’s about now? It’s not a school shooting, it's a commentary on the slippery slope of a whiskey on the rocks? If it seems like I’m grasping at straws to nail down what this movie is actually about in an attempt to discredit it, trust me, that’s not what I’m doing.

I literally have no fucking idea what this movie is actually about, and that physically sickens me given how much I wanted (and want) to love it. However, every time the movie seems to be latching onto one thematic through line, it gets funny again. I couldn’t believe my ears, the laughter was so consistent in my theater that the audience had been primed to laugh away literally everything horrific that had happened after the film’s first 45 minutes. Even through my favorite sequence.

There’s a moment where Miss Gandy is camping outside Alex’s house, before she knows what’s going on, if anything, and is just skeptical about the homelife of the only child in her class who survived the mass abduction. She falls asleep in her car across the street from the house and what follows was so fucking well directed I could’ve cried, it was the only flicker of satisfaction I’d get from the entire run time. As Garder sleeps in her car, Alex’s front door opens to an absolute abyss, and a stiff-moving figure emerges from the darkness with shears in hand, it’s Alex’s mother. A mannequin with crazed, wiry, and blonde hair, and locked joints that hardly move stagger towards Garder’s car. The lighting is so well done that it looks like the entire scene was captured on a physical roll of film. It looked like Friday the 13th, a genuine masterclass. As Alex’s mom moved towards the car that was containing our protagonist, the entire audience was erupting in laughter at the absurdity of the figure’s movements, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, there was nothing funny about this scenario, and yet the audience had already been trained to laugh at the absurdity of the movie by this point. Trying to block out the laughter, I watched the mother eventually make it to Gandy’s car, expecting her to break into and drag Gandy right out of the driver’s side window, but she doesn’t. The mother walks out-of-frame and all you can hear is her climbing into the unlocked back row door which Gandy left open. The sheers enter the frame and snip off a lock of Gandy’s hair, and the mother returns to the house. This is wholly unsettling and I should not have to explain why it’s existentially terrifying, and yet, people were laughing their ass off like it was a Key and Peele skit. Sickening.

Another decent moment is a nightmare sequence for one of the abducted children’s fathers, Archer Graff, played by an underutilized yet otherwise compelling Josh Brolin. Graff is having a nightmare about his son leaving the house, he chases his son in the nightmare and loops back to the front door. He looks overhead and a silhouette of an assault rifle highlighted by lightning is towering over his home. A giant neon sign that says “HEY. IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW THIS MOVIE WAS ABOUT GUNS BEING BAD, NOW YOU DO.” It’s slightly ridiculous and on the nose, it leads into a fairly presented jump-scare but I was too busy hung up on the fucking Assault Rifle cloud to give a shit. The movie doesn’t even end up being about guns, literally or metaphorically. At one point Graff describes the movements of Gladys' “weapons” as heat-seeking. So is it about missiles now? Are the kids at risk of being killed by missiles? Are the kids the missiles?

I refuse to be receptive to “this cinematic endeavor constitutes a kaleidoscopic and rigorously interrogative disquisition upon the intricate concatenation of socio-political afflictions presently plaguing the American populace, and any interlocutor incapable of discerning its layered themes grossly advertises themselves as a culturally illiterate plebeian unworthy of serious discourse” ass retort. This movie is either about nothing or it’s about everything. If it’s about nothing (which, in my opinion, it is), it needs to hone in on something more specific, a core idea. If this movie as about everything, then it critiques none of those things particularly well.

Moreover, there’s a difference between corny and campy, and I am thoroughly sick and tired of self important internet critics conflating the two. This movie has several eye-roll-inducing corny moments that are so fucking prevalent that they make the actual campy shit hilarious.

Weapons is the funniest fucking piece of media about a school shooting, alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, and abusive control you’ll ever see, and that is a fucking tragedy.

4/10. I will never watch this movie again. I hope Cregger's next one lands better with me.