Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Samaritan’ on Amazon Prime, a Sylvester Stallone Superhero Flick That’s Bereft of Originality

Sylvester Stallone anchors Prime Video’s Samaritan, best described as a superhero movie, but with all the joy squeegeed out of it. Apparently that’s the review right there, but I’ll soldier on. I guess it tonally compares to the bleak vigilante-isms of the triumphant The Batman, which was a more grim and disturbing entry in the genre, albeit one boasting a good screenplay, good direction, good acting, good ideas, good dialogue, good visual effects and good music. Which leaves Samaritan as a simple story about a superhero who’s now a dumpster-diving sanitation worker, so insert your garbage man joke here.

SAMARITAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A boy’s voice narrates, and I summarize: Once upon a dreary f—ing time, twin brothers were born with super strength and super healing and super invulnerability of the epidermis. Wunza good guy and wunza bad guy, Samaritan and Nemesis respectively (duh), and they both died in a battle to the death in a flame-and-steam factory. A coupla decades later, the narrator kid, Sam (Javon “Wanna” Walton), lives in the city of Granite City, a city whose main export has to be flame-and-steam factories. In fact, I’m convinced Granite City consists of roughly two-thirds flame-and-steam factories. We’ll see a few of them before the movie’s over. Granite City is a rainy rubbish site overrun with lawless thugs, homeless people, striking workers, the unemployed and surely at least 500,000 very sad and wet scraggly stray dogs. It makes RoboCop’s Detroit look like Pleasantville. I imagine it’s even worse than Concreton, Slabville and Cementfield. If general disgruntlement with existence was a city, it’d be Granite City.

Sam’s dad is dead and his mother (Dascha Polanco) has the only job afforded to single moms in movies like this – Nurse Working Shitty Hours. Sam is a target for bullies and the landlord is always taping eviction notices to their apartment door. LIFE SUCKS. Sam isn’t without hope, however. He’s a megafan of Samaritan. He believes the superhero isn’t dead and is somewhere in hiding. He draws Samaritan on his notebooks and keeps a worship wall of news clippings and watches YouTube videos about the guy and is a step or three shy of becoming a full-blown internet weirdo. Because he’s young and stupid and hasn’t seen enough movies like this (and there are plenty), Sam falls in with a mohawked shithead gang leader named Cyrus (Pilou Asbaek), who worships Nemesis and envisions ruling the flaming, steaming rubble of Granite City in the spirit of the villain.

Meanwhile, in Rear Window distance from Sam lives a humble garbage man (Stallone) with mitts like honeybaked hams and a face that hasn’t cracked a smile since the Space Race. He shoves dumpsters around and occasionally plucks an ol’ radio or camera out of them so he can fix ’em up. It’s obvious that this guy is just a guy named “Joe Smith” (as it says on his apartment nameplate) and not a superhero in a reclusive funk, just wiling away the time fiddling with soldering irons and little screwdrivers. Of course, what with this and that, “Joe Smith” sort of accidentally becomes a grandfatherly advice-giver to Sam, who suspects the guy’s more than just a gruff old fart – and might come in handy when Granite City needs to be pulled from the steaming flames of anarchical rule!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: My favorite flame-and-steam factory is in my favorite Stallone movie, Cobra (“This is where the law stops, and I start – sucker”). So Samaritan is a drab mashup of that, RoboCop dystopia, Kick-Ass and Unbreakable alt-superheroisms and the gruff guy/gee-whiz kid dynamic of Real Steel or, more apt, Over the Top.

Performance Worth Watching: I’ll just say that this cloddish material does no one any favors here.

Memorable Dialogue: Perhaps the most self-aware speech of Stallone’s long career: “I’m a troglodyte. You know what that is? It’s Greek for ‘a man that dwells in a cave.’ I’m a caveman. I live in a tiny apartment. And it’s fine. I like bein’ alone. You know what bothers me? Bein’ around other people. You follow me?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Samaritan is a real PSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEY, I tell ya. This is a dried-out husk of a dead-fishbone of a screenplay, bereft of a single original idea or fresh riff on the genre. Every scene is a predictable trudge through an arc of bankrupt story tropes. The kid is a scintilla of a millimeter away from full-on waywardness and the old man is a similar asshair’s breadth from hapless hermitdom, and in each other they find Something to Believe In, etc. etc., you know the drill, except this time, it feels like the bit is spinning right against our temples. Inspiration is low. These characters are driven forward not by mutual affection, but by the relentless chugging steam-and-flame choo-choo train of formula. Sam and “Joe Smith” aren’t in control of anything here. Their fates are never in doubt.

I guess the film stands out somewhat for its relentless, edge-of-PG-13 brutality. Chokings, beatings, stabbings, shootings, throwings through walls, breakings of arms with pipe wrenches. The third act is just heads being kicked and backs being broken and grenades and bombs exploding. It’s old-school Stallone in that sense, except 35 years ago, it would’ve been rated R and far heavier with the red dye and corn syrup, and given him at least three or four more withering one-liners, and had no CGI, which this movie is laden with. CGI so phony, I laughed in its fake-ass face. Stallone gets one one-liner here, and it’s delicious with irony: “Have a blast.”

Our Call: It has to be said. Can’t resist. No avoiding it: Bad Samaritan. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.