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"Samaritan" dir. by Julius Avery


"Samaritan"

Where I watched it: Prime

I always appreciate the idea that some people are interested in making/watching superhero movies that are not connected in some way to the Marvel or DC universe. It's kinda rare of course but it does happen... M. Night Shyamalan made his attempt with the Unbreakable trilogy as did James Gunn with Brightburn.

That being said, its a difficult task when you're up against films with colossal budgets that have an already hugely established fan base. It requires very outside of the box thinking. I think that's why Brightburn succeeded and the Unbreakable trilogy felt a little too much like a knockoff. A film that tried to think outside the box by taking a test drive in the POV/found footage lane was Chronicle, which was ultimately a garbage movie but I do appreciate the attempts that were made to do their own thing (while doing the exact same things every superhero movie before it did).

Samaritan falls into the category of "E for effort" but I will say it was more engaging than I expected it would be based on everything I knew about it.. which wasn't much. Going in, I wasn't aware that it was directed by Julius Avery. For those of you that are thinking, "who?" let me save you the trouble of Googling him. He directed "Overlord." Overlord was an over-the-top nazi zombie gorefest that was amazing and if you haven't seen it, check it out asap I'm pretty sure it's on Netflix.

Anyway, I didn't know that he made Samaritan as well and had I known this, my expectations would have been much higher.

Old Stallone is old Stallone. Same mumbly performances but now he looks like he's about to literally fall apart if the bonding agents of plastic surgery and layers of make up were to wear off. It might be time to send this Italian Stallion off to the glue factory.

This movie follows Stallone who plays a garbage man named Joe Shit with a penchant for hoarding broken garbage like Ryan Phillipe's character in the unbelievable "Wish Upon." Joe also may or not be the superhero believed to be dead named Samaritan.

His neighbour, a young boy coincidentally named "Sam" is obsessed with the lore of Samaritan but finds himself aiding in petty crimes for a local crime lord known as Cyrus to help his mom pay rent. Cyrus is obsessed with Samaritan's mortal nemesis, "Nemesis" who is also believed to be dead.

Sam the kid gets himself into a pickle of a situation when the crime bro's who dress like takeshi69 beat him up one day. Joe sees this and decides to not hold back his super strength any longer, beats up the crime bro's and kind of bends a knife.

This act causes Cyrus to learn that Samaritan is potentially still alive, and so forth plays the superhero movie we've all seen a thousand times before.

All in all this movie was not terrible but it was by no means good. The acting was pretty bad, the CGI (especially in the final scenes) was student level and the plot was boring with the exception of one exciting reveal (that's not even really that exciting and maybe even quite predictable).

5/10

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