- Starring
- Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich
- Director
- Zach Cregger
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Horror, Mystery
- Release date
- Aug 8, 2025
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
In the small town of Maybrook, at 2:17 AM, seventeen children from Justine Gandy’s third-grade class vanish without a trace, captured on doorbell cameras with arms outstretched like airplanes. Only one student, Alex Lilly, remains, casting suspicion on their teacher, Justine, and spurring a desperate investigation led by grieving father Archer Graff. As the community grapples with the mystery, strange events escalate, unraveling long-buried secrets that threaten to tear the town apart.
Weapons REVIEW
Weapons has flashes of promise, but its two-hour-eight-minute runtime drags a thin story across five disjointed, Roshomon-esque POVs that feel more like a gimmick than a necessity. What could’ve been a tight hour-long tale gets bloated, ending in a rushed battle that leaves too many questions dangling. A linear approach might’ve given the narrative room to breathe and resolve its loose ends.
The cast delivers solid performances, wringing what they can from a script that undercooks every element of the story. No amount of on-screen charisma can salvage a "mystery" that unfolds as a string of "then this happened" moments. A good mystery hands the audience the pieces to solve the puzzle while keeping them hooked. Weapons skips the sleuthing, serving up revelations on a platter, often by sheer chance, with little effort from the characters or the script.
Instead of digging into the investigation, the film lingers on the cast’s daily routines and emotions, which might’ve worked if the payoff felt earned. The villain? Full of potential but ultimately barely a character. There’s a difference between mystery and half-baked storytelling, and Weapons leans hard into the latter.
WOKE REPORT
You're Only Getting Half the Picture.
This section is our site's secret sauce, and what truly separates us from the rest. If you don't read it, you haven't read our review.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
Disappointing. I was hoping for a better initial result. Guess I’ll wait to watch on streaming.
Got unnecessary gay shit in it, and you call it based? Worthless site.
*sigh* Had the film’s narrative been driven by a sanctimonious agenda, we would have graded it much more harshly. As it is, Wong’s proclivities are barely a blip in the film. So, we quantified it as such. 1.5 minutes of a gay character being passively gay doesn’t make the entire film woke.
The purpose of the Woke Report is to itemize and detail the instances of wokeness so that our readers can decide for themselves what’s too much.
This is a subjective thing. In the 1980s and in the 1990s, a movie might include a brief mention of homosexuality but it was usually framed as either a gag, a disturbed person, or something that generally made people feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t normal then. Today, when the movie checks the homosexuality box as an inclusion requirement, it’s because the audience needs to be reminded that homosexuality is now completely normalized and anyone who flinches, cringes or says “no” to homosexuality is denying reality.
One brief moment of homosexuality doesn’t make the whole film woke, but for a lot of us it reminds us of the long road of blackmail tactics that got us to this point and we don’t like to see it, no matter how briefly.
I couldn’t agree more. Which is why the site offers a nuanced approach and both a Woke Report and a Woke-O-Meter score. The score is indicative of how much any perceived wokeness may have affected or infected a program. While the report gives the specifics, allowing each individual to decided what they can stomach.
There’s no such thing as a perfect system, but I think ours is the best out there.
I will say that in the original spec screenplay (that sparked a biding war), Benedict Wong’s character, ANDREW, is not gay. He is married with a wife, GINNY. However…
*SPOILER BELOW*
Ginny meets a similar fate in the notorious kitchen scene. In that earlier draft of the screenplay, the possessed Andrew simply chokes his wife to death in front of Gladys. I can only guess that the reason they made Andrew gay was so that he could kill his husband in a MUCH more brutal way in the finished film. Having a husband repeatedly bash his wife’s face to pulp probably wouldn’t have sat well with audiences. That’s just my hunch. Good review.
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