Skip to main content

REVIEW: Samaritan


    It's only in a landscape like today's, one where the superhero myth is so deeply intwined in the pop culture fabric, that a deconstructionist superhero movie like Samaritan could feel warranted. There's no shortage of contemporary examples from which to learn. This makes the film's ultimate stumble all the more mysterious and all the more disappointing.


    The film's premise gives it every chance to be a thoughtful piece within the superhero craze and independent of it. Here's a story about a boy lacking a strong male role model just hovering above poverty and wondering where the heroes have gone. All the while, his community teeters on disarray and anarchy as the powers that be neglect the larger population. It's the kind of world where no one's expecting a hero, but the hopeful among us sure are hoping for one. 

    Thirteen-year-old Sam thinks he's found the answer to his prayers in his aged neighbor, Joe. After witnessing a few displays of altruism and superhuman strength, Sam becomes convinced Joe is actually the long-lost superhero, Samaritan. And why not? Maybe your local garbageman actually is the underappreciated superhero your community needs. Sam tries to pull Joe back into the battlefield just as tensions in the city are rising, when the world really needs a superhero. 


    A lot of the film's more tasty ideas would land better if they were allowed to reveal themselves naturally through the action instead of dug up and flagged by dialogue. Note the way Cyrus explains through dialogue why supervillain Nemesis was actually the good guy not two minutes after he first appears on screen. How thoughtful of him to drop the movie's antithesis so early ... Arguably the film's real novelty hinges on a third act reveal, but even that impact dissipates almost immediately on arrival by confused commentary. It's a shame. This movie really would work so much better if it didn't try to explain itself so much.

    Stallone affords drops of vulnerability in small amounts, but his performance coasts on a flat level of standard Stallone gruffness. Meanwhile, relative newcomer Javon Walton might actually be a fantastic actor, but he needs more textured material. (Apparently he's in Euphoria? Perhaps he's better served there.) In the role of Sam, he's neither plucky enough to be endearing nor hardened enough to be tragic. 

    Walton arguably has better chemistry with the film's antagonist, the vengeful Cyrus, played electrically by Pilou Asbæk. He's on fire every second he's onscreen, and Asbæk gets more creative than simply playing him like a mustache-twirler. In fact, it's only when he dips into playing a literal supervillain that the illusion feels out of synch.

    The film's director has described this as the product of Unbreakable and Finding Forrester, which certainly explains the movie's overcast aesthetics. But without any variance, this grunge eats up the film's bids for sincerity. Where are the flickering colors of comic-book glory that Sam is supposed to be chasing? This might be more of a missed opportunity than a full-bred flaw, but the lack of dialogue gives the movie a muted flavor that casts an umbrella. Moments that might come off as operatic in a more thought-out film read as trite and awkward here. Lines like "Nemesis was destroyed by his own hate," feel inorganic in such a grounded world, especially when they come from the mouth of a self-professed cynic.

    And that's the movie's problem. It knows that defeatism and hope are in constant opposition, and that superhero mythology is an ideal vehicle to explore this duality. It wants to land somewhere on that spectrum, but Samaritan spreads itself too thin and hopes that if it pads itself with easily packaged takeaways, we won't notice the difference. The end result isn't particularly bad, but it is a missed opportunity.

                            --The Professor

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Does the World Owe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

             When I say “first animated feature-film” what comes to mind?             If you’ve been paying attention to any channel of pop culture, and even whether or not you are on board with the Disney mythology, then you know that Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first ever full-length animated film. (Kinda. The Adventures of Prince Achmed made use of paper-puppetry way back in 1926, but that wasn’t quite the trendsetter that “Snow White” was.) You might even know about all the newspapers calling the film “Disney’s folly” or even specific anecdotes like that there somewhere around fifty different proposed names for the seven dwarfs (#justiceforGassy).  DC League of Super-Pets (2022)           But in popular discourse, l ots of people will discuss Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as little more than a necessary icebreake...

REVIEW: ONWARD

     The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with. Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles. This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to guide its output.      The film imag...

REVIEW: Snow White

     Here's a story:       When developing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , one of the hardest scenes to nail was the sequence in which the young princess is out in the meadow and she sees a lost bird who has been separated from its family. As she goes to console it, The Huntsman starts toward her, intent to fulfill The Evil Queen's orders to kill the princess and bring back her heart. The animators turned over every stone trying to figure out how to pull off this episode. They went back and forth about how slow he would creep up on her. When would he bring out the knife? When would the shadow fall on her? One of the animators reportedly asked at one point, "But won't she get hurt?"       That was the moment when Walt's team knew they had succeeded at their base directive to create pathos and integrity within the form of animation--to get audiences to care about a cartoon, such that they would worry that this tender-hearted girl wa...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 25 Most Essential Movies of the Century

       "Best." "Favorite." "Awesomest." I spent a while trying to land on which adjective best suited the purposes of this list. After all, the methods and criteria with which we measure goodness in film vary wildly. "Favorite" is different than "Best," but I would never put a movie under "Best" that I don't at least like. And any film critic will tell you that their favorite films are inevitably also the best films anyways ...      But here at the quarter-century mark, I wanted to give  some  kind of space to reflect on which films are really deserving of celebration. Which films ought to be discussed as classics in the years ahead. So ... let's just say these are the films of the 21st century that I want future champions of the film world--critics and craftsmen--to be familiar with.  Sian Hader directing the cast of  CODA (2021)     There are a billion or so ways to measure a film's merit--its technical perfectio...

REVIEW: The Electric State

     It's out with the 80s and into the 90s for Stranger Things alum Millie Bobby Brown.       In a post-apocalyptic 1990s, Michelle is wilting under the neglectful care of her foster father while brooding over the death of her family, including her genius younger brother. It almost seems like magic when a robotic representation of her brother's favorite cartoon character shows up at her door claiming to be an avatar for her long-lost brother. Her adventure to find him will take her deep into the quarantine zone for the defeated robots and see her teaming up with an ex-soldier and a slew of discarded machines. What starts as a journey to bring her family back ends up taking her to the heart of the conflict that tore her world apart to begin with.      This is a very busy movie, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. This just a movie that wants to impart a lot. There is, for example, heavy discussion on using robots as a stand-in fo...

The Paradox of The Graduate

     If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces.       But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like  The Graduate .      I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since.      But what's int...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

     Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in.      We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...

REVIEW: Mickey 17

Coming into Mickey 17 having not read the source material by Edward Ashton, I can easily see why this movie spoke to the sensibilities of Bong Joon Ho, particularly in the wake of his historic Academy Award win five years ago. Published in 2022, it feels like Ashton could have been doing his Oscars homework when he conceived of the story--a sort of mashup of Parasite , Aliens , and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times . Desperate to escape planet earth, Mickey applies for a special assignment as an "expendable," a person whose sole requirement is to perform tasks too dangerous for normal consideration--the kind that absolutely arise in an outer space voyage to colonize other planets. It is expected that Mickey expire during his line of duty, but never fear. The computer has all his data and can simply reproduce him in the lab the next day for his next assignment. Rinse and repeat. It's a system that we are assured cannot fail ... until of course it does.  I'll admit my ...

REVIEW: Ezra

     I actually had a conversation with a colleague some weeks ago about the movie, Rain Man , a thoughtful drama from thirty years ago that helped catapult widespread interest in the subject of autism and neurodivergence. We took a mutual delight in how the film opened doors and allowed for greater in-depth study for an underrepresented segment of the community ... while also acknowledging that, having now opened those very doors, it is easy to see where Rain Man 's representation couldn't help but distort and sensationalize the community it aimed to champion. And I now want to find this guy again and see what he has to say about Tony Goldwyn's new movie, Ezra .       The movie sees standup comedian and divorced dad, Max (Bobby Cannavale), at a crossroads with how to raise his autistic son, the titular Ezra (William Fitzgerald), with his ex-wife, Jenna (Rose Byrne). As Jenna pushes to give Ezra more specialized attention, like pulling him out of publ...

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Clash of the Titans

  Anyone else remember the year we spent wondering if we would ever again see a movie that wasn't coming out in 3D?      T hat surge in 3D films in the early months of 2010 led to a number of questionable executive decisions. We saw a lot of films envisioned as standard film experiences refitted into the 3D format at the eleventh hour. In the ten years since, 3D stopped being profitable because audiences quickly learned the difference between a film that was designed with the 3D experience in mind and the brazen imitators . Perhaps the most notorious victim of this trend was the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans .        Why am I suddenly so obsessed with the fallout of a film gone from the public consciousness ten years now? Maybe it's me recently finishing the first season of  Blood of Zeus  on Netflix and seeing so clearly what  Clash of the Titans  very nearly was. Maybe it's my  evolving thoughts on the Percy Jacks...