Movie Review: ‘Weapons’

‘Weapons’ receives 8.5 out of 10 stars.Opening in theaters August 8 is ‘Weapons,’ written and directed by Zach Cregger and starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, and Amy Madigan.

​‘Weapons’ receives 8.5 out of 10 stars.Opening in theaters August 8 is ‘Weapons,’ written and directed by Zach Cregger and starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, and Amy Madigan.   

‘Weapons’ receives 8.5 out of 10 stars.

Opening in theaters August 8 is ‘Weapons,’ written and directed by Zach Cregger and starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, and Amy Madigan.

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Initial Thoughts

We’ll admit we weren’t major fans of writer-director Zach Cregger’s feature debut, ‘Barbarian.’ While we appreciated its opening act and the film’s overall unpredictability, we were left dissatisfied by some uneven acting and a sense that it was two stories stapled together. Cregger’s second feature, ‘Weapons,’ is a whole different scenario. Once again Cregger experiments with narrative structure and tonal shifts, and while he occasionally loses his balance, he brings his various plot strands and character arcs together in a much more cohesive fashion while maintaining a better mix of dread and macabre humor.

This makes ‘Weapons’ one of the best horror outings of 2025 to date – not too shabby in a year that’s already seen the release of excellent genre fare like ‘Sinners’ and ‘Together.’ ‘Weapons’ may not have as much of the social commentary of those films, but it’s a frightening, gripping tale that still – in the tradition of authors like Stephen King – has something to say about small town paranoia and the mistreatment of children.

Story and Direction

If you’ve seen any of the trailers for ‘Weapons,’ you know the premise: one night at exactly 2:17 a.m., 17 children from a third-grade class in the town of Maybrook all wake up in their homes and run off into the night, never to be seen again. A month later, law enforcement, school officials, and parents – led by the grief-stricken Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) — have no clues about what happened; only one child from the class, Alex (Cary Christopher), remains, while the town’s suspicions fall mainly on the class teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner).

All that essentially happens in the first 10 minutes of the movie, with some of it narrated by a child who hints at the bizarre nature of the events to follow. And bizarre they are: ‘Weapons’ is the kind of movie that it’s better to see with as little foreknowledge as possible about what’s to come, and the film takes off in some unexpected directions from its initial setup before coming full circle.

Cregger relates this through a series of interlocking stories for each of his main characters – including Justine, Archer, a town cop and former lover of Justine’s named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local homeless junkie named James (Austin Abrams), school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), and Alex himself. Every story overlaps to some degree with the others, although told from the point of view of whatever character it’s focused on, and they all dovetail in the film’s third act. While this creates a bit of a repetitive rhythm as the movie goes on, each character’s tale varies enough from the others and reveals a bit more each time of the mystery at the movie’s center, keeping one transfixed as the horrific picture becomes clearer.

Cregger handles this looping structure extremely well for the most part, while also balancing a nicely expanding sense of dread and terror with moments of truly morbid humor that spring organically from the increasingly ghoulish situations he concocts. That tightrope act goes a little off the rails in the third act, as the violence escalates rapidly and some of the finale veers a touch too far into unintentionally comedic terrain – but not enough to dilute what’s come before. There are also a few plot holes along the way if one looks hard enough – but again, not enough to stop this from being an absorbing, scary trip.

Some of the film’s key sequences provide genuinely terrifying payoffs to the atmosphere that Cregger patiently builds in slow-burn fashion, aided by Larkin Seiple’s moody cinematography and an excellent, wide-ranging score by Ryan and Hays Holladay as well as Cregger himself. For most of its 128 minutes, ‘Weapons’ is a tightly-woven tapestry of horror that doesn’t over-explain itself and retains a singular filmmaking vision.

Cast and Performances

‘Weapons’ is the definition of an ensemble piece, with excellent performances from all involved. Julia Garner seems much more confident and well-cast here than she was in her previous horror outing, ‘Wolf Man,’ as Justine, the teacher with just enough of a murky past that her clear love for her students is used as a – dare we say – weapon against her. Josh Brolin is also reliably outstanding as Archer, the actor using the innate tension between his gruff, tough guy façade and empathetic interior to create a fundamentally decent human being who is pushed to his limit by the loss of his son.

The underrated Alden Ehrenreich uses his chameleonic skills well as the equally vulnerable Paul, while Austin Abrams and Benedict Wong offer some of the film’s more humorous moments. And Cary Christopher is heartbreaking as Alex, the little boy suddenly left alone by nearly everyone in his life. Each of these characters gets more development than is often usual in horror films, which only adds to the viewer’s investment when all are placed in peril. And there’s one other performance about which we’ll say little – except that it’s thoroughly chilling.

Final Thoughts

While the horror genre itself is not having as dependable a year as usual at the box office (sorry, Blumhouse), Warner Bros. Pictures is bucking that trend: following the surprising ‘Final Destination Bloodlines’ and the transcendent ‘Sinners,’ this is the studio’s third creatively successful fright fest in a row.

What makes it even more gratifying is that this is a wholly original and personal piece. The menace at the heart of ‘Weapons’ is one that other films have touched on before, but not quite in a scenario and setting like this. In that sense, ‘Weapons’ and ‘Barbarian’ do share common ground – the idea that evil can spring from the most unexpected places at random moments, albeit after festering out of sight for years. It’s a worldview and an approach that Zach Cregger is, pardon the expression, weaponizing to create some of the most interesting work in the genre right now.

What is the plot of ‘Weapons’?

One night, all but one child from Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) classroom mysteriously run off into the night. Justine and the rest of the community are left questioning who – or what – is behind the children’s disappearance.

Who is in the cast of ‘Weapons’?

Josh Brolin as Archer GraffJulia Garner as Justine GandyCary Christopher as Alex LillyAlden Ehrenreich as Paul MorganAustin Abrams as JamesBenedict Wong as Andrew MarcusAmy Madigan as Gladys LillyJune Diane Raphael as Donna MorganClayton Farris as Terry MarcusWhitmer Thomas as Mr. LillyCallie Schuttera as Mrs. LillyToby Huss as Captain Ed

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