One night, at 2:17 AM, 17 elementary school children of a small town wake up from their beds and run away into the night, disappearing without a trace. The police and the townspeople are bewildered, but their school teacher Justine is suspicious of Alex, the only child from her class who didn't disappear, and observes his house. Archer, one of the father of the missing children, teams up with Justine. The school principal Marcus attacks and chases Justine in a store, but dies when he is hit by a car in the street. It turns out Alex's parents invited a distant relative, witch Gladys, who caught them under her spell, and forced Alex to bring personal possessions of his classmates, so that Gladys can cast a spell to send them to their house, so that she can suck out their energy and rejuvenate herself. Alex takes a curl of Gladys' hair, wraps it on her witch stick and places a drop of his blood on it, thereby causing all the children to attack and kill Gladys. The spell is therefore broken, and Justine and Archer find the kids.
"Weapons" is a good horror, but its initial mystery premise is so much better than its sole resolution in the finale, which is banal and falls into exploitation horror clichés. The opening set-up is wonderfully eerie and stimulating: 17 children wake up in the middle of the night, walk out on the street and disappear. Neither the police nor the parents have a clue what happened. This concept ignites interest of the viewers, and the director Zach Cregger crafts several stylistic solutions (the heroine, school teacher Justine, is initially only seen from the back, her face not shown), whereas at least one sequence is an example of elevated suspense (Justine falls asleep in her car while spying on Alex's home, and during the night the doors of the house open and a deranged woman holding scissors in her hand is seen exiting in the dark and walking towards her), but with time, as if "Weapons" starts depleting its sophistication, and the blunt scares take over (two jump scares in the first half, when Justine and Archer have nightmares, seem to be inserted just to keep the viewers' attention since the authors gave up to try to engage them narratively). The idea that the story stops and is presented through six different perspectives is ambitious, but at least two of them could have been cut since they do not contribute much (police officer Paul and drug addict James). "Weapons" is one of the rare movies that actually gets worse after the introduction of a character for which the actress playing it won several awards. Amy Madigan is a very good actress, but her character Gladys is a typical one-dimensional villain. There are certain multilayered themes here, since Gladys could be an allegory of the embodiment of various dangerous Tik-Tok challenges that influence kids to do damaging things, or a parasite (she appears right after Marcus and his partner watch a documentary on TV about a fungus that eats an ant from inside). But since all the character are poorly developed, and the finale is standard bloodshed, "Weapons" is not able to grow into something more than a good horror, which the opening act hinted at.
Grade:++
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