Monday, 20 April 2020

Bad Samaritan (2020) - Movie Review



Remember Geostorm? Unless you’re an obsessive like myself who writes about nearly every new movie they watch, probably not. Well, get ready for the whiplash because this is what director Dean Devlin made after that infamous attempt to beat Roland Emmerich at his own game. And the result could not be more different from his previous. He’s gone from world-spanning disaster spectacle to an thriller with elements of home invasion cinema that has more in common with the works of Thomas Harris than anything to do with making us fear man-made climate change.

This in and of itself is nothing new in the film world, as directors often go for something smaller after a relatively large undertaking to pace themselves. However, not only is this stylistically different from Devlin’s past filmography, it’s also a major entertainment switch-up as well. As in I don’t need to lean on ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ rhetoric to vouch for this thing; it is genuinely good.

The plot itself is rather bare-bones, following somewhat in the footsteps of Don’t Breathe in its ‘you broke into the wrong house’ impetus and leading into a more traditional procedural element, and it’s something that requires solid actors to make lively. Something this film has in abundance. Playing the part of yet another murderous bastard with a penchant for gaslighting, David Tennant is brilliant as the villain here. The accent takes a bit to get used to (or maybe that’s just because I know him more for his tenure on Doctor Who than Jessica Jones), but for cold and calculating menace, his dressage-obsessed trust fund kid is gripping in all the right ways for a story like this.

Opposite him is Robert Sheehan of Misfits fame, and while it’s nice seeing that he is holding onto his native accent for this, it’s just straight-up mesmerising seeing him breeze through the character he’s given. A home burglar who, after a single shocking encounter, reconsiders his life and his own moral compass, isn’t something that any actor can pull off. But seeing Sheehan give his all to the role, never relenting on the emotional energy or his insistence on saving the woman he found in that house, really drives home the dramatic irony of his place in the story; the man who did the right thing for once in his life, and nearly lost everything in the process. Oh, and Kerry Condon is amazing too, giving some of the best lines in a film surprisingly well-stocked with them.

Not that all of this is entirely out of character for Dean Devlin, though. It still carries that bizarre comedic vein that gave us the gloriousness of Andy Garcia declaring that he’s the goddamn President of the United States of America, only it’s much better metered out here. The initial scenes with Sheehan’s Sean and his literal partner-in-crime in Carlito Olivero’s Derek make for decent banter, along with an amusing scene of a dog chasing Derek around while ‘on the job’. But when shit gets real, that fades away into proper nail-baiting that the genre is built on, so it doesn’t get too carried away with the jokes.

Nor does it get carried away with the effects work, which is mostly good here. When people get beaten the fuck up or shot or tied up in chairs, it looks legit… but that’s because the practical effects are on-point. The CGI, though? Well, it’s thankfully far lesser here than before, but even in the brief moments it shows up, it looks off. From the opening scene of a younger Cale flogging a horse to death, which looks like the gritty reboot of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron that no-one asked for, to the one explosion we get, it manages to be jarring even though we only get brief seconds of them on-screen.

But that’s a very minor niggle in a film that otherwise is very thrilling. The acting is solid, the pacing is good and tight, the cinematography and soundtrack add a lot to the tone (especially a brilliant scene revealing where the killer’s victims have been buried), and it even has a bit of class commentary with the dirt-poor thief going up against the upper-class and tech-savvy villain. Not quite as good a blend of home invasion and class satire as, say, Parasite, but it adds enough spice to keep this from being entirely generic. And even when taken as a generic thriller, its ability at engagement alone makes it worth checking out.

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