Revenge stories have long made for natural movie material. But can the pursuit of payback be presented too sympathetically? Many movies,  from Old Boy to even The Princess Bride, and this is to say nothing of classical myths, have suggested that a character’s unquenchable thirst for vengeance can be a bad thing.  Director Sam Raimi’s new desert island thriller, Send Help, seems untroubled by such questions. In the movie, Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a put-upon office worker with a very sympathetic modern problem: a smarmy, unfair, and all-around bad manager at her office job, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien). By all appearances, a conscientious, careful, and detail-oriented worker at a midlevel corporation of some sort, Liddle seeks professional advancement from management to the executive suite. She is implausibly denied such opportunities in an outrageously over-the-top fashion that would probably result in lawsuits in today’s HR-oriented work culture — yet we are asked to accept it in furtherance of the film’s agenda. Liddle is made the butt of jokes for her appearance, including her sloppy table manners when munching on a tuna-fish sandwich at work. She is said to be the subject of complaints for her odor, and she is cruelly excluded from the staff karaoke night. She is denied credit for a report she labored over by a colleague. Preston treats Liddle with undisguised condescension and scorn. He declines to promote her, is seen shamelessly interviewing a blonde bombshell, and ultimately settles on a former fraternity brother and golfing partner for the role that should be hers. Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien in “Send Help.” (20th Century Studios) Of course, these slights propel the movie forward: the more shabbily Liddle is treated, the more justifiable are her subsequent reprisals. It should matter that she comes across as the target of credible workplace discrimination, not the absurd victim of a wholly unrealistic vendetta. But if Raimi had not made her treatment outlandishly unfair, nothing in the film that follows would make any sense. Raimi, whose previous hits include the Evil Dead series and the Tobey Maguire iteration of the Spider-Man franchise, is a specialist in wildly exaggerated, cartoonish action singularly unsuited for an earnest message movie. Therefore, the filmmaker participates in the uncharitable denigration of Liddle in his film. He clearly regards her as a version of a childless cat lady when he shows her breathlessly stating her hopes for her new job and new life to her pet bird, before they settle in to watch the latest season of Survivor. Liddle’s enthusiasm for that show (and her choice to watch it on her regular television set, rather than a smartphone) is meant to be a sign of her terminal lameness. McAdams is dressed for maximum dowdiness: her green bathrobe, mauve sweatshirt, and the barrettes in her hair are all well chosen, though faintly heartless. Yet by the time the movie reaches its central plot twist, Raimi has left no doubt that Liddle is the character we are meant to sympathize with. When Preston suggests that Liddle tag along on a business trip to Bangkok, she sadly seems to take the opportunity too seriously. “Who else is ready and rarin’ to fly high?” she asks in her typically peppy manner. On the plane, Liddle dutifully pecks out a report even as her colleagues improbably gain access to her cringey homemade audition tape for Survivor and have a good, hearty laugh over it. Just another indignity for our embattled heroine. But the plane is torn to bits by a storm, and Liddle and a badly injured Preston are deposited on what is apparently a desert island. Now the setting becomes less Office Space and more Lord of the Flies. Liddle, with her Survivor skills and gung-ho attitude, turns out to have all the know-how for desert island emergency life. She procures food for Preston, tends to his injuries, and constructs them Cast Away-style shelter. But only on her terms. When he whines, speaks condescendingly, or appears too antsy about being rescued, Liddle makes clear that she is in charge of their marooned existence. There are several practical problems with this development. For starters, if Liddle is sufficiently resourceful to manage life on a desert island, why could she not have summoned the fortitude back home to quit her job and get a better one? Among the examples of her newly revealed skillset is the ease with which she kills, beheads, and cooks a wild boar. “While you were sitting here like a bump on the log,” Liddle says with typical gusto, “little old me was bringing home the bacon.” This might be more effective if the island were visualized a bit more grandly: most of the time, Liddle and Preston seem to be inhabiting a very small parcel of beach, and the wider views of the island reek of CGI, as does the boar. More troublingly, the movie makes a false equation between the offensive but nonlethal tyranny of Preston in the office and the real, growing, despotic madness of Liddle on her island. Liddle takes ruthless delight in exercising power over Preston now that the shoe is on the other foot, berating and belittling him continually. No wrong conceivably committed against Liddle back at the office could justify her choice, on the island, to ignore signs of civilization that might rescue the duo. At one point, she even uses animal venom to drug Preston and engage in an elaborate mock castration. “Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness,” she says. And we never do again. But we are uncertain how we are meant to take Liddle’s increasingly evil acts because the film depicts her so sympathetically as grievously wronged by the bureaucratic put-upons of a bad office and a bad boss. It’s clear the director wants us to think the contemporary, office-based evils done to Liddle justify her revenge in the state of nature she winds up in. RIP UP THE SCRIPT: REVIEW OF ‘THE RIP’ But something is artistically and morally wrong here. Several fellow moviegoers at my multiplex vocally took Preston’s side, the intended villain, because his punishment was so extreme. A better film would scrutinize the toll exacted on Liddle’s soul for her commitment to revenge, or at least make the point that her island-bound meltdown is, at best, an overreaction to her workplace unhappiness. Raimi may accept that Liddle is deranged, but her derangement is depicted as secondary to her righteousness. Send Help too often excuses Liddle’s objectively insane behavior as a sign of spiritual growth — of girl power exacting justice on toxic masculinity, or, at least, toxic obnoxiousness. Some may find that message empowering, or at least entertaining. But it would be negligent not to wonder at what cost. Is there no sin too great to overlook in order to teach the Prestons of the world a lesson? Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer for the Washington Examiner magazine.