Rocks Reviews: The Samaritan

The Samaritan (2022)

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Pilou Asbaek, Javon Walton

Director: Julius Avery

Platform: Amazon Prime

Its fair to say that we have an abundance of superhero movies at our disposal to watch and throw away like yesterday’s jam. DC has a film on the slate called ‘Plastic Man’ for fucks sake. However Amazon, buoyed by the success of comic book adaptation ‘The Boys’ — has just released ‘The Samaritan’ — a ‘dark, new take on superhero movies’. Now immediately this description rings alarm bells for me in a very DC way. Superhero movies are now very much 3 things:

1: Straight up, Captain America, Apple Pie and Justice whilst a Ham-eating baddie loses after a 2nd act twist.

2: Dark, Brooding Nolan-esque Batman which is best avoided by anyone else attempting this, lest they choke on a mouthful of grit.

3: The funny superhero. See Deadpool, Amber Heard trying to act.

So I very much doubted that this film would slot into a new category 4 that would make me rethink all of my moral judgements about super-hero films. To be honest, I don’t even really care for a lot of superhero films and when I started watching this, I thought it was a B-Movie type premise of a vigilante back to clean up the old streets of his town, kind of like Hobo with a Shotgun if he could get his gun ordered next day delivery.

It was only as I turned it on that I realised it was a superhero movie as a somewhat confusing and horrible looking opening sequence, which is a combination of animation and live action took place whilst a narrator tells the story of The Samaritan and his brother, Nemesis. Apparently they were bullies who were nearly burnt alive, but they survived and one went good and one went evil. There’s something about a hammer being forged from hatred (fuck off) and then we are into the film.

One of the best things you can do if you have a lead actor who is a child is make them likeable. Javon Walton can act, and has his moments, but I found his character incredibly fucking annoying and also makes a succession of stupid faces when he runs. He becomes convinced that his neighbour is The Samaritan despite the fact he was allegedly killed 25 years ago in a fire. He comes to this realisation after he witnesses his carrying a broken radio, pulling a broken fan out of a bin and watching Stallone beat up 2 kids that look like Post Malone ordered from Wish.

Yes…this is what we have to work with.

I’m pretty sure if I sat 100 apes down at 100 typewriters, I would watch a maximum of 2.5 Rocky films and one of them would have written the outline for the script of this film. Stallone does a manful effort of trying to build a character that you care about. However he is also 76, and despite the best efforts of the effects department he looks pretty fucked for most of the time, his opening fight scene in particular looks awful (the shit Post Malone one) and in the following action scenes there are so many cut shots its like looking at an album of Polaroids.

The dialogue between him and the supposedly 13 year-old Walton is cringeworthy at times too, with Walton in particular jumping between cool, calm and staccato panic with all the control of a meth-addled kangaroo. There seems to be a constant stream of emotional life lessons between the two of them too which becomes wearing after about 10 minutes. Not everything has to be a wholesome moment Bezos!

Then there is Pilou Asbaek. I liked his introduction. I thought his initial aesthetic was interesting as a gangster operating out of some kind of scrapyard and inheriting a load of electrical supply disrupting grenades. Having used them to break into a police precinct evidence locker to steal Nemesis’ mask and hate-hammer, he not only morphs into a bellend but he does the kind of Bane impression that you would pay 20 quid to a plumber from Solihull to do on Cameo as a shit birthday present for someone you hate. His band of goons is equally hateful, not in a good way but in a ‘I hope you all get wiped off the face of my screen by some kind of fucking claymore mine strapped to a review of how bad this film is’. There’s comedy shooting during a raid of a house during which the gang shoot bullets like they’ve spent a month getting the Ludivico-Treatment whilst watching Bad Boys 2 on a loop, and the sheer volume of transfer tattoos is phenomenal, and almost every single one of them is shite.

Anyway — back to the plot — his gang have some plot to blow up the city grid to enact some kind of chaos on the city, but don’t count on the return of Stallone. There is a fun scene as he works his way through 5–6 henchmen in the warehouse including a semi-fun fire-extinguisher take out after we get to see him doing some emotional close-up driving like in The Expendables. The in warehouse-confrontation is as you’d expect as the 3rd act twist is revealed in all of it’s ‘Might shock an 8 year old’ glory. In the aftermath, there is some fucking awful looking CGI again and then Asbaek gets to use the wonderfully nonsensical line ‘Wipe the City dark’. Which makes even less sense reading it written down.

Anyway, fighty fighty fight, lessons we learned along the way, yada yada yada. It was Oscar Wilde who said when a man is tired of Stallone hitting things with a hammer (made from hate nonetheless) he is tired of life. Well I was fucking exhausted by the end of the film. Honestly, if you wanted to do a new dark take on the superhero genre, why not change Stallone’s character to the ex-Carlisle United goalkeeper Jimmy Glass. If you changed Stallone’s character to an ex League 2 goalkeeper who went missing after scoring the goal that kept Carlisle in the football league but a small boy identifies him to play in a football game to save the city’s football club — there is a superhero film I could get behind.

As it is, I had to watch Asbaek doing a level of acting i would expect from Wes Bentley wearing a Jason Vorhees mask as the 3rd act plays itself out in a hail of CGI fire as Stallone conquers the flames that have haunted him for years and rescues the child, who by now has become essentially fucking irrelevant as anything more than a plot device. I should also add as a sidenote here that I’ve not mentioned any female characters in this film as the only two of note are either comically over the top (Sil — Henchman for Cyrus) or comically awful (Child’s mum). The denoument sees Stallone’s character avoid death by heart explosion (because he nearly got too hot — watch the film and you still won’t understand this utter batshittery) before him and the child run out of a burning building and jump straight through a wall on the street opposite as the burning building explodes behind them.

‘Oh Shit’ says the child as they turn round.

Et Tu Brutus.

Et Tu.

Positives: Granite City looks cool, Stallone is trying, Possible Jimmy Glass Origin story

Negatives: The Script, The Acting, The Script Again.

Rating: 2/10.