Weapons (2025) * *

Directed by:  Zach Cregger

Starring:  Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Amy Madigan, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams

Weapons starts out strong and suspenseful and about two-thirds of the way through settles into the mundane.  There likely was never a way to create a payoff worthy of the setup, and Weapons fails where it should succeed the most.  Cregger's 2022 hit Barbarian unfolded the same way, and led to disappointment.  Weapons reaches a point where it stalls and can't start up again.

Weapons has been an unexpected box-office hit here in the late summer of 2025.  The opening is mysterious and dark, with seventeen children, all from the same classroom in the local elementary school, awakening at 2:17 am and fleeing their homes to vanish without a trace.   They were following some sort of direction, but to where?  Were they abducted by aliens?  Were they murdered?  The next morning, teacher Justine Gandy (Garner) walks into school to discover her entire classroom save for one student (Christopher) absent.  The disappearances gain local and national media coverage and Justine herself is soon held responsible by parents and the public demanding answers from her.  In their minds, Justine had to have done or said something to make seventeen kids disappear one night.

The most vocal of the parents is Archer Graff (Brolin), who makes it his business to discover his son's whereabouts and they lead to a disturbing home across town owned by a family of seemingly catatonic parents and a grandmother (Madigan), who practices witchcraft.  Anyone who enters the home soon finds themselves in a zombie-like trance.  Until this point, we discover how wounded Justine and Archer are by this sad sequence of events, both actors creating sympathetic characters who aren't equipped to handle such unprecedented goings-on,  Then again, who would be?  

But then we grow impatient and a bit let down once we learn the truth of what happened and Weapons loses its trump card.  It settles into a typical horror story full of jump scares and gore, which is the last thing we wanted or expected from a buildup that starts out so promising.