For me, Weapons was a mixed bag and would’ve benefited a lot if it were a TV miniseries and not a feature-length film.
Weapons (2025) is the talk of the town right now when it comes to horror movies. The movie has so many genres in it, so it’s kind of hard to call it a horror movie, even though it’s mostly being regarded as such. It’s because there are a few graphic scenes in it that you would see in a gory horror movie.
But there are so few horror scenes in Weapons Kind that it makes you think if it could have been something else. It doesn’t seem to really become a horror movie until the second half of it. My biggest problem with this movie is the fact that they spent so much time on each character. That can work, as the characters are mostly interesting, but the problem is the format of the movie. It kind of fails in my opinion.
The film is cut into segments showing each character’s personal experience of the events happening over a few days. So once you get attached to a certain character or want to see more of another character, it takes you back to the events that you had already seen. Sometimes it worked, and then sometimes it didn’t. The movie would’ve been fine if they had just stuck with one or two characters to show honesty.
That’s why I say Weapons would be good as a miniseries, as each episode could be all about that character. You see this character’s experience of the events, and then the next episode is the other character’s experience of the events. In a movie, it makes it feel a lot longer, and it kind of drags. The pacing feels all over the place, and it keeps me from being more gripped.
Because I didn’t know about the jumping around in Weapons, I was gripped when I first watched it, and then when it started jumping around, I lost interest. If they did a miniseries, they could have really unique episodes, film them differently with different directors, and be able to go all out on that idea. Like the game, Until Dawn.
As a movie, Weapons feels kind of all over the place; even the genres feel that way. It seemed to try a lot of things, but didn’t necessarily do one of them better than the other. It could’ve ignored a lot of the horror elements and spent more time on the drama. This is another movie this year with a great cast, but not the best writing and execution.
