LONDON: Word that Sylvester Stallone was producing and appearing in a new superhero movie — and one that didn’t fall within the expansive Marvel or DC stables — gave rise to a sense of cautious optimism among movie and comic book fans. After all, Stallone has shown a real talent for breathing new life into grizzled characters — 2006’s “Rocky Balboa” and 2015’s follow up “Creed” are so good because Stallone was willing to acknowledge his own physical limitations, and let those movies become fascinating character pieces.
So the idea of him playing an aging, faltering superhero in “Samaritan,” helmed by “Overlord” director Julius Avery, is an appealing one. Stallone is Joe Smith, a garbage collector living and scraping a living in downtrodden Granite City. All Joe wants is to live out his days, fixing junk and watching TV. Except that his teenage neighbor Sam (Javon Walton) has convinced himself that Joe is the Samaritan, a superpowered hero who died decades before, saving the city from his brother, Nemesis. When Sam falls in with local crime boss Cyrus (Pilou Asbaek from “Game of Thrones”), Joe has to choose between keeping his secret or saving his young friend.
Sadly, “Samaritan” soon becomes an oh-so-predictable, depressingly formulaic slugfest between Stallone’s reluctant hero and Asbaek’s over-the-top pantomime villain. The dynamic between Joe and Sam zig zags so many times that it never feels genuine, and the wider story behind Granite City’s woes are never really explored. A third act plot twist briefly promises to give the movie a bit of life, but it is obviously telegraphed, and then seamlessly ingested back into the bafflingly plothole-riddled story faster than you can blink. It is a shame, because you can almost feel how much Stallone wants this movie to work. But “Samaritan” feels too much like a mess of superhero movie tropes, thrown together with little more than hopeless optimism to bind the film together. Much like Joe’s outlook at the start of the story, there are some causes simply worth giving up on.