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Credit: Amazon
‘Samaritan’ Review: Sylvester Stallone can’t be arsed
'Samaritan' - Julius Avery
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Four years ago, the Australian filmmaker Julius Avery splattered onto cinema screens with his Nazi-zombie thrill-ride Overlord, a film so packed with creative juices that its imagery remains pertinent to this day. Indeed, his dynamic vision at the helm of Amazon’s latest superhero flick Samaritan was the only thing holding the film back from almost inevitable failure. However, even his influence wasn’t enough to resurrect 2004’s worst superhero movie from the ashes.
Whilst Overlord seemed inspired by the gritty punk aesthetic of zombie video games, Samaritan feels like the overlong cutscene of a damaged Playstation one game, filled with stiff acting, half-baked set-pieces and a rudimentary art style.
Breaking through into a superhero sub-genre so congested with Marvel and DC properties was never going to be easy, with only the most original and eye-catching concepts surviving in such a volatile landscape of cinema. How Amazon thought they could capture the attention of a hyperactive youth with their grey-scale clunk of a superhero movie is rather extraordinary.
Introduced into the world of Samaritan with the vibrant pop of comic-book visuals, Avery and screenwriter Bragi F. Schut present us with the protagonist, a young boy named Sam (Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton). He trusts that an old superhero may still be around despite going missing twenty years ago. Suspecting Joe (Sylvester Stallone), the elderly gruff sanitation worker who lives around the corner, Sam stalks the man until he finds out the truth he had pondered for so long.
Sylvester Stallone is the superhero Samaritan, the titular hero who carries as much charisma as an empty crisp packet, fighting off his enemies with as much agility as RoboCop. It’s a multi-faceted problem that involves an actor who seems like he simply cannot be arsed to act and a script that is so half-baked and uninspired that it feels like it has been ripped from the back pages of a child’s schoolbook.
With the absence of the Samaritan’s power over the city of the story, rebellion begins to breed and Pilou Asbæk’s Cyrus becomes the figurehead of such violence, encouraging a band of goons to join him in his takeover of the city; for some reason. Wielding a fantastical sledgehammer, which happens to be the only thing that can take Samaritan down, Cyrus makes an erratic plan to defeat the titular hero and seize control of the city streets.
Whilst oddly confusing, Samaritan’s biggest sin is its unforgivable tediousness, playing out exactly how you’d predict it to, with every story beat being foreseeable before you’ve even started the movie. Any remedy to such boredom falls frustratingly short, with the villain offering nothing but stupid one-liners and the action being so few and far between that you often forget the main character is even a superhero.
Falling behind the pace of fellow streaming services, if Amazon thought Samaritan would be the movie to take them back to the top of industry prominence, they are gravely mistaken.
