I saw Send Help, which is more aptly titled than I realized.

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), who is a useful and reliable if also awkward employee, has been promised a VP promotion by the CEO who has recently deceased. This promise, which was known to other senior employees, is broken by the CEO’s son Bradly Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who assumes his father’s position.

The company needs help however with a merger, so Linda is asked to accompany these senior employees and the new CEO on a trip to Bangkok. She can according to Bradley teach his former frat bro Donovan (Xavier Samuel) what she knows and then be reassigned from their corporate headquarters to a satellite location.

Linda is drafting a merger memo on the flight while Donovan plays her survivalist reality show video application for the rest of the group. She eventually realizes why they’re laughing and then deletes her draft just before the plane in an unexpectedly graphic scene begins to disintegrate after an explosion and crashes, and sinks, into the ocean.

The only other survivor besides Linda is an injured Bradley, whom Linda rescues and helps recover. Her survivalist hobby obviously becomes relevant, and affords her an advantage, as does later her former marriage to an abusive husband whose death she stopped preventing.

Linda, who cannot save Bradley from a two-dimensional caricature, ostensibly develops her heretofore type character with this account of her part in her late husband’s demise, which could influence the last third of the movie but remains underdeveloped at best. As a result, it seems like an add-on, or an empty gesture in this survivalist horror thriller, which is how it is described.

Linda’s motivation remains a mess even at its end. Why would she sabotage their rescue even if she was relying on the resort home she had discovered? And could the conclusion reinforce an impression that she has parlayed her time stranded on this island into the self-serving career that she despised, and we presumably are to despise, in Bradley and his bros?

Critical consensus nonetheless is quite positive. More than 260 offer sufficiently positive reviews for example to earn it a Rotten Tomatoes certified fresh film status. Those who recommend it consistently cite the director Sam Raimi, the entertainment value of this movie, and its professional validation for those with bad bosses in their generally positive reviews.

Surely these reviewers, and the industry, think more of audiences. Or maybe that explains why the movie menu is so often filled with so little appealing.

We need more than that.