“Weapons”
Genre: Horror/Mystery
Rated: (R)
Released: August 8, 2025
Trigger Warning: Graphic violence/ gore, self harm, drug use, explicit language, and some sexual content 

Rating: 3/10 

Despite having an incredibly suspenseful trailer, the movie “Weapons,” a so-called horror/mystery movie, did not hit the mark it intended. 

Released in theaters on Aug. 8, 2025 the film features some A-list stars including Julia Garner and Josh Brolin. Its primary pull is the question of where and why all these kids left their houses in the middle of the night. The premise of the movie is that in this town, at 2:17 a.m., 17 of the 18 children in one third-grade class all get up and run out of their houses. The teacher, Justine Gandy, is put under fire because it was her class that went missing. However, no evidence was found to prove she did anything. The teacher and the father of one of the missing kids, Archer Graff, team up to find them and save the day, despite him initially being suspicious of Gandy being the perpetrator. 

The initial problem presented was interesting in its own right. The odd way the children ran, the ambience of it being at night, all added to the mystique the movie had. The narrator is a little girl who went to school where the missing children went, but is not a character in the plot. She didn’t take up a lot of time, but the times she did were much better than if she had been involved in the plot or affected by the incident at all. Adding a personal connection to the narrator can make them unreliable due to their bias and potentially convolute the story. 

Visually, the cinematography of the movie was beautiful. The shots were lined up well and smooth. The saturation of color wasn’t too much, and the film stuck with a more realistic color grading than a movie like “Twilight,” where it’s more blue. 

The actors obviously had to depict some complicated emotions, which were well executed, especially with the previously mentioned actors who played Gandy and Graff, respectively. The gore, despite there only being a handful of incidents, was grotesque and a tad more reasonable than in other movies I’ve seen, such as The Terrifier movies. A good chunk of the dialogue was humorous , as well as a few of the scenes, in terms of what was happening. In one scene, Graff has a nightmare about his son, where at the end the son turns into the main antagonist. Freaked out, Graff wakes up and screams “What the f***?!,” breaking that jumpscare from the nightmare with a comedic moment. 

Though the narrator wasn’t terrible, it was clear in many parts that it was a bad imitation of childlike speech. The narrator is prevalent for 5 minutes at the beginning and end of the movie, but is practically absent in the middle. 

She starts by telling the audience the sequence of events that happened like a story, but then drops it as soon as the rising action starts. To preface, the movie is a little over two hours long, and moviegoers can figure out who the main antagonist is and what happened about a half an hour in. 

“Weapons” tries to build tension, but diminishes it through comedic moments and relies on jump scares. To classify such a film as being horror is to discredit what it means. 

The film would’ve been better off embracing the mystery aspect more than trying to do both and be funny. Movies have to walk a fine line between being sensible and being predictable. 

“Weapons” stumbles from one side to the other in a drunken stupor. On one hand, some parts of the plot and character decisions are indubitably mindless. On the other hand, not 60 minutes in, the movie is predictable down to the last plot point. Two of the more prominent side characters could’ve been nixed since they didn’t help move the plot forward. They felt like fillers in between action scenes, trying to pace the movie slower and keep the mystery, but it didn’t work. The movie might’ve been a better, more fleshed-out 90 minutes than the two useless hours it occupied. 

All the good aspects of horror movies are lost in the humor and lack of tension in the setting of “Weapons,” leaving it unsalvageable by the good acting or aesthetics. The plot was like every generic horror movie about a witch eating kids. A tale as old as time, not to mention that “Hocus Pocus” did it better. 

This movie is a 3/10 overall.