Samaritan Review

 

Samaritan is a comic book movie based on Mythos Comics graphic novel of the same name. The film is produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Balboa Productions and distributed by United Artists Releasing and Amazon Studios. Samaritan is written by Brian F. Schut and directed by Julius Avery.

The story is 25 years ago there use to be a great hero named Samaritan. But after an intense battle with his arch enemy called Nemesis, he was assumed dead. For years people believed that, until one young boy named Sam finds out he's alive, but isn't the same great hero he once was. This all might change when a new villain shows up and causes havoc in the boy and Samaritan's neighborhood.

 

Initial Reaction

One of two reasons of why I wanted to see this because of Sylvester Stallone. He's given us a lot of great stuff. You got Rocky, Rambo, Nighthawks, Cliffhanger, Cobra, Demolition Man. Heck, I even enjoy The Expendables movies. So when I found he was gonna do a grounded comic book film, I was interested. Which brings me to my second part and that the grounded aspect of the film. Unlike a lot of other folks, I would prefer more variety when it comes to comic book films. It doesn't always have to be something bright, colorful, and fun. Remember the old saying, variety is the spice of life.

Cons

One issue I had with the film was there's this big twist. And somewhere I wanna say during the first act, maybe the beginning of the second, you can pretty much tell what the twist is. The other problem was the villains. They're generic, there's no better way to put it, they're generic. They started out promising enough when they were praising Nemesis, but as the film went on they slowly turned into nothing special.

Middle Ground

What I found okay with Samaritan was the action. It is fun, but I do wish that whenever Samaritan hit somebody they didn't cartoonishly fly eight feet. I understand he has super strength and everything, but if they wanted to show it was a really hard hit, they could've done in a much better way. Another gray area was with Samaritan's backstory. While he is the title character, it did seem like the movie was more focused on Sam. Sure, we do get somewhat of an idea with Samaritan, but there still could've been something more there. I'm by no means saying the film should've given an entire dialogue dump of why and how, cause that would've caused more problems. What I'm saying is there could've been more show don't tell scenes.

Pros

The one truly good thing was the acting. While nobody is gonna win any awards the cast still put in a pretty good job, despite the fact the script is just decent at best.

While I don't fully love Samaritan as much as I wanted too, it's still alright. While the action and the hero's backstory could've been better, it was still an okay job. The acting is also helping this film because everyone still managed to give a good performance despite a decent enough story. The only things that didn't work was the twist and the bad guys.

My final rating is Okay.

So yeah, you don't have to rush to Amazon Prime for this one, but if you're curious have at it. Anyhow, that's going to do it for me. Come back on Monday, Aug 29th for part six of Looking Back at the Film's of 2021. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day.