In this action film from Julius Avery, Sylvester Stallone stars as a sanitation worker who may be a superhero.
“Samaritan,” a grouchy time-waster directed by Julius Avery, pounds the sidewalks of a fictitious city where decades ago, the super siblings Samaritan and Nemesis — mortal enemies and twins — dueled to the death, yet continue on as spray-painted symbols of hope and rage. A 13-year-old petty thief named Sam (Javon Walton) yearns to believe that the gallant brother secretly survived, and might even be his neighbor, Joe Smith (Sylvester Stallone), a sanitation worker with a penchant for musty action hero quips. (“Going my way?” he grunts to an elevator of goons.)
This broken town needs a savior. Poverty roils the streets and Sam’s single mother, a working nurse (Dascha Polanco), struggles to make rent. The cinematographer David Ungaro and the production designers Greg Berry and Christopher Glass have created a city so lousy with litter, peeling paint and tatty couches that it’s believable when a criminal named Cyrus (Pilou Asbaek) convinces its citizens to rally behind his staged resurrection of the wrathful twin, Nemesis, who he claims punched the right people. At the same time, Cyrus’s irritable minion Reza (Moises Arias, an electric presence amped by eye-catching tattoos and hair), just wants to punch everyone, starting with Sam and Joe.
Bragi F. Schut’s script mumbles its potentially intriguing themes: Do crumbling communities need a fighter or a figurehead? Do good and evil coexist inside us all? In lieu of embodying these questions, Stallone’s character, an apathetic, self-proclaimed troglodyte, glumly flattens a toaster with his bare hands. Michael Lehr’s fight choreography is designed around special effects that require little from the actor, who hurls scores of nameless brutes through walls with just a tap. At one point, Stallone even growls, “I’m not going to wreck my knees entertaining you.”
Samaritan
Rated PG-13 for cursing and combat. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
