Rob v. Nate CorddryVD Review wrote:

There's a scene at the end of Wednesday where the hot tamale latina lady invites the dumb burnout guy to her motel room to get his money and some sex (I'm not even going to touch the way women of colour are sexualized, exoticized, objectified, and othered in movies made by white men). I'm very familiar with this scene because I watched it several times for academic reasons regarding her banging brown tits and ass. She also invites the gay judge, who ends up shooting and killing the burnout with the dummy's own gun. This seems like a highly improbable outcome, yet it also seems as if she planned it? She then insists the judge take the bag of money, which he doesn't want, just so she can later send Rainn Wilson with a gun to get it. FORTUNATELY Rainn Wilson, despite not being a "gun guy," also ends up shooting and killing the judge for no good reason, tying up the second-to-last loose end. Just as planned? At one point her big secret collaborator even says "chance favours the prepared mind" or whatever Die Hard villain proverb, as if that covers it. I can appreciate the narrative sleight of hand of making your narrative magician's assistant's top fall off at the weakest point in your trick, but that's just going to backfire if I have the whole performance on tape and get off on what's under tops.

The jokes "worked" insofar as I understood I was watching set-ups long before I got to the punchlines, at which point instead of laughing all I could do was sigh and take my polaroids of the set-ups down off the big mental conspiracy board I had to build to watch this movie. The worst offender: when the latinx minx - both of those words spelled with three X's, one for each of her orifices I want to eat refried beans out of - says sarcastically, "you mean did I see my husband and his criminal friends sitting around a table covered in blueprints of the bank they were planning to rob" and you're like, I guess I'm going to have to pretend to be surprised when I unwrap that scene aren't I? No, wait, I changed my mind. The WORST offender is when we have to watch the deputy getting decreasingly flustered over having to sit in the back seat, until the payoff is... he just had to sit in the back seat one time, then three more times, and he's a child about it. Which is a joke that could've actually worked, if it were told in the right order.

The twist ending came out of left field. There was no reason to suspect the father of the dead child of fathering the dead child, except that his was the last arm we were supposed to believe would shoot its own brother, and the arm needed a motive. That the arm would shoot its owner's brother, I mean, not that the arm would shoot the arm's brother, the other arm. Though now that I think about it, it did that too! So with that revelation, I'm willing to concede calling the screenplay's structure a gimmick might've been a bit harsh, but it was definitely a trick. Perhaps how much you enjoy Shimmer Lake will come down to how much patience you have for magicians.