Samaritan: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An amateurish, derivative piece of superhero drivel.

Samaritan, starring once-upon-a-time Hollywood mega-star Sylvester Stallone, is a new superhero movie now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The film, based on the Bragi F. Schut graphic novel of the same name, is written by Schut, directed by Julius Avery, and produced by Sly Stallone himself, and tells the story of Samaritan, a superhero who died decades ago in a face off against his supervillain twin brother Nemesis…or did he? Thirteen-year-old Sam (Javon Walton) thinks Samaritan is alive and well and living as his neighbor in a dilapidated apartment building in a rough and tumble section of Granite City. Joe Smith (Stallone) is the shredded old-man who works as a garbage man that Sam thinks is the superhero in hiding.

Sam and Samaritan’s hometown, Granite City, is on the brink of collapse and is populated by a group of Nemesis worshipers who want to see the world burn. These Nemesis lovers are led by Cyrus (Pilou Asbeak), who is sort of a poor man’s Bane. Sam, trying to help his single-mother pay the rent, gets mixed up with some bad seed Nemesis people and Joe Smith comes to his rescue and the story goes from there.

I’ve not read the Samaritan graphic novel, but its premise sounds intriguing and this film version certainly has similar potential. Samaritan is trying to be an original, grounded, alternative superhero movie, in the same vein as M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. But I know Unbreakable, and due to dreadfully amateurish direction and abysmal acting, Samaritan is no Unbreakable, in fact, it’s absolute garbage.

Director Julius Avery is an unquestionable hack behind the camera. Avery is entirely incapable of eliciting even remotely competent performances from his cast, with the lone exception being the magnetic Pilou Asbaek.

Javon Walton is ostensibly the lead and is an egregiously grating screen presence. Apparently, Walton is the next big thing among young actors, but his work in Samaritan is atrocious.

Speaking of atrocious, Sly Stallone is nearly unwatchable in the film.  Yes, Sly still has his absurdly ridiculous perfect body and surgically enhanced face to match, but he once again resurrects his usual sad-eyed, sullen-faced character of which he is so associated, without the least bit of aplomb. As evidenced by his decades long success playing Rocky and Rambo, you’d think Stallone could do tough-guy sad-sackery in his sleep, but Samaritan literally proves that thesis wrong as its just Sly sleep walking.

Stallone isn’t exactly Olivier, but he has always had his own distinct brand of charisma, but in Samaritan his dead-eyed performance is so awful as to be alarming. For example, Stallone’s monotone dialogue lacks all semblance of life as well as any natural rhythm. This isn’t Rocky mumbling some brain-damaged speech, in Samaritan Stallone sounds like a non-native English speaker reciting lines in a second or third language for the very first time. It’s like he’s an alien who has never heard people talk before. Sly is so appallingly bad in some scenes as to be astonishing.

Stallone was the producer on the film, so it’s not like he’s just playing the role for a quick buck, he’s invested in the movie, which is why his abominable performance is all the more concerning.

Stallone is so bad that one can’t help but blame not just Stallone but director Avery, who didn’t yell “Cut! Let’s do it again!” Maybe Avery felt he couldn’t actually direct his boss, who knows? Or maybe he just doesn’t know how to direct.

Another strike against director Avery is his work with cinematographer David Ungaro. There are some scenes in this movie that are so poorly filmed as to be ridiculous. For instance, there’s a rooftop confrontation in the movie where the lighting is so unprofessional that it would be laughed out of a student film.

As for the writing, the plot, its twists, and the rest of it, everything is second or third rate at best, including the production design which somehow makes the $50 million budget look like less than a million.

Samaritan is an MGM film and came over to Amazon when the Bezos behemoth bought the movie studio for $8.45 billion. Another MGM property which came to Amazon in that buy is the Rocky franchise, which propelled Sly Stallone to mega-stardom when it first hit big screens back in 1976.

My advice to anyone contemplating watching Samaritan is to do yourself a favor and skip this cheap, derivative piece of inanity, and just watch any of the Rocky movies, even the awful ones, instead. You’ll still see inanity aplenty in the Rocky movies, but at least you’ll also get to see Sly Stallone being a better version of Sly Stallone…one with life in his eyes.

©2022

Nope: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here. Just more cinematic fool’s gold from Jordan Peele.

Back in 2017, writer/director Jordan Peele became an adored critical darling, and Academy Award winning screenwriter, for his box office hit, socially-aware horror film, Get Out.

What critics and many fans failed to realize at the time, and still seem completely blind to, is the fact that Peele became the new “it” director not because he’s a great talent or because Get Out was some brilliant piece of moviemaking, he isn’t and it wasn’t, but rather because liberals were in such a furious tizzy over Trump’s election victory and presidency that they were defiantly grasping for anything at all to hold on to and celebrate. As a decades-long Trump-loather myself, I understood the impulse, but refused to fall under its disorienting spell, especially when it comes to cinema.

Get Out was the perfect movie to be celebrated in this rather insane moment for two reasons. First, because it was a movie about how awful white people are and white liberals could signal their virtue and how they were “one of the good ones” by watching it and being vociferous in their praise of it.

Secondly, Get Out was directed by a black man and critics were desperate to heap praise upon anything that made them seem “not racist” aka “one of the good ones” and which inflated the “diversity and inclusion” balloon.

I said it at the time, and it only holds more-true today, that Get Out is an absurdly over-rated movie written and directed by an even more absurdly over-rated director. If Get Out had come out at any other time it would have been quickly, and rightfully, forgotten for being shallow, tinny, amateurish and vapid.  

Proof of my thesis regarding Jordan Peele and his sub-par work was evident in Peele’s follow-up film, Us (read my review of it here). Us was, like Get Out, somewhat clever in theory, but an absolute shitshow in execution. Whatever kernel of a good idea Peele had regarding Us, eventually grew to be an unwieldy and incoherent mess of a movie. But since Peele has been tapped as the new “it” director, critics, and many fans, pretended that Us was brilliant. So-it-goes in matters of cultural/political faith, I suppose.

Which brings us to Peele’s latest cinematic venture, Nope.

Nope, a sort of sci-fi/horror/western, stars Academy-Award winner Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings, the depressive O.J. and the aggressively depressing Emerald Haywood respectively, who grew up on their family’s horse farm in Southern California. The family raises and trains horses to be used in the movie business and are actually related to the first man to have ever been captured on film (a black man riding a horse).

Things start to get interesting for O.J. and Emerald when some very strange, UFO-related stuff starts happening on the ranch.

I will refrain from any further exploration of the plot to avoid spoilers but will answer these specific questions about Nope.

Is it coherent? Nope.

Is it well-written? Nope.

Is it well directed? Nope.

Is it well-acted? Nope.

Is it a good movie? Nope.

The reality is that Nope is a frustrating and irritating, middling misfire of a nonsensical sci-fi horror film that has nothing of import to say about much of anything.

Of course, other critics are slobbering all over Nope for the same exact reasons they slobbered all over Get Out and Us. But critical and fan praise of Peele is becoming more and more untenable as he continues to churn out these cinematic shit sandwiches that are critical fool’s gold.

It’s somewhat amusing to me that one of the least comprehensible parts of the movie concerns a neighbor of the Haywood siblings, the Park family, whose patriarch is a former child star named Jupe (Steven Yeun). Jupe suffered a horrible tragedy while working on a sitcom in the 90’s, and that story is infinitely more interesting than the Haywood’s UFO stuff. In fact, I’d love to see a movie about Jupe and the calamity he witnessed rather than the tedious tale of the Haywood ranch.

I mean, I get it, Jupe’s story and the Haywood’s story in Nope all deal with the horror of being moved down on the food chain as well as the exploitative nature and dangers of fame and fortune, but Peele seems allergic to profundity and brings nothing unique or mildly interesting to those topics.

As for the cast, Daniel Kaluuya is a terrific actor and a very pleasant screen presence, but his O.J. feels flat because there’s nothing for him to grab onto in the script.

Keke Palmer may be a good actress, I don’t know, but her Emerald is one of the most annoying characters imaginable and grates to epic proportions every moment she appears on-screen.

Other characters, like Steven Yeun’s Jupe and Brandon Perea’s Angel, are so thinly written as to be vacant caricatures. Although to be fair, Yeun at least fills his vacuously written Jupe with some semblance of inner life which is missing from the rest of the cast.

The problem is that due to the fact that there is almost no character development beyond exposition, it’s next to impossible to feel any connection to these people or to ultimately care what happens to them.

Other issues with the film abound as well. For example, the special effects are second-rate…and they include one of the more laughable on-screen monsters in recent memory as it looks like an origami jellyfish or a paper-mache octopus or a headache-inducing screen-saver or something.

Peele’s writing on Nope is scattered, his pacing lethargic, his storytelling anemic and the entire affair feels egregiously bloated with its excruciating 131-minute runtime.

Peele also loads the film with a series of empty scares that are false and cheap and ultimately undermine audience trust in the film and the director. This tactic can sometimes work in building tension, but in Nope it ends up strangling audience anticipation until in the climactic final act they are left with nothing to give and nothing to care for.

Nope will do fine at the box office because there is basically nothing else out there and the weak-kneed critics and Peele fans will relentlessly bang the drum for its brilliance, but let’s be real…Nope is not a good movie.

And finally…can we stop? Can we just fucking stop pretending that Jordan Peele is Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg? He isn’t. Hell, he isn’t even M. Night Shyamalan for god’s sake.

Look, I get it. I thought Alex Garland was the next big director after I saw Ex Machina. Unfortunately, he wasn’t (and it should be said that Ex Machina is an infinitely better film and better made film than Get Out) and has churned out two dogs in its wake.

Other people fell for Jason Reitman in the same way after his early films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air), which, like Get Out, were all ridiculously and egregiously over-rated.

It happens, critics and movie fans can get carried away and envision a bright career for an “important” movie maker that requires talent you think you see but which isn’t really there. But you’ve got to snap out of your spell of infatuation when the facts are contrary to your fandom inspired delusions.  

In regards to Peele, Jason Reitman is the perfect example because, at best, Jordan Peele is maybe…maybe, a mediocre moviemaking talent who has successfully pulled the wool over critics and fan’s eyes, just like Jason Reitman did. That’s it. Jordan Peele is Jason Reitman, and now we are just waiting to see if critics will ever wake up to that moribund reality.

As for Nope, it is not a good sci-fi film, or a good horror film, or a good western, or a good social satire. I can honestly report that not only do you not need to see this movie in the theatres, you actually never need to see this movie at all. If someone wants to take you to see it, just look them in the eye and say “nope”.

©2022

Bird Box: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A derivative supernatural thriller that holds little to no cinematic appeal.

Bird Box, written by Eric Heisserer (based on the book of the same name by Josh Malerman) and directed by Susanne Bier, is a supernatural thriller about a woman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The film stars Sandra Bullock with supporting turns from John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes and Sarah Paulson among many others.

During my recent daily online reading routine I kept coming across headlines saying that the Netflix film Bird Box was racking up prodigious amounts of views. Falling prey to the Netflix marketing campaign, which included those sure to be bogus view numbers and the plethora of manufactured stories about said bogus numbers, and also being the mindless lemming that I am, I decided I too should watch Bird Box to see what all the fuss was about.

Upon seeing the film I can now report that the fuss is phony. Bird Box is a glorified made for tv film that is an amalgam of other not very good movies, and some downright awful movies. If M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, one of the worst movies imaginable, had sex with its first cousin that was a cheap knock off of A Quiet Place, and then gave birth to a six-toed simpleton that had a regional theatre’s version of Sophie’s Choice’s next door neighbor’s friend from high school’s sister as its wet nurse, you’d get Bird Box.

Bird Box, and the online hype surrounding it, reminded me of when I was a kid and one of the networks (there were only three back then) would hype an apocalyptic movie of the week where killer bees or fire ants turn on humans, or something equally absurd. I was always a sucker for such movies, but being young was never allowed to stay up and watch them, thus they got to maintain their mysterious power over me even as I grew into an adult (or whatever I am now). Of course those killer bees/fire ants movies were awful and everyone who wasn’t twelve or younger at the time knew it, even the poor local newscaster who would tease a story during a commercial break and then try and stay solemn and professional as he uttered with liquor fueled indignation the classic phrase, “stay tuned for that story and sports with Champ and Brick with the weather on the 11 o’clock news at the conclusion of the movie”.

Like those movies of the week, Bird Box does have an interesting, if not entirely original, premise, that for some mysterious reason there are waves of mass suicides taking place. This post-apocalyptic world is ripe for exploring numerous philosophical questions on the meaning of life, God, humanity and purpose, but instead of serving a rich feast of cinematic questions, the film takes dramatic shortcut after shortcut and ends up being a thin gruel of regurgitated pablum with no value whatsoever.

Bird Box’s alleged success is really a result of the marketing team cashing in on having Sandra Bullock as the movie’s lead actress. Bullock does commendable work in the film, and I am assuming/hoping she received hefty remuneration for her duties because all of those views Netflix is bragging about are because she is still “America’s sweetheart”….a less grating version of Julia Roberts.

Bullock carries the film from start to finish and does so with her usual down to earth, approachable aplomb, but that doesn’t mean the acting is top notch, it isn’t. The cast includes some big name actors like John Malkovich, Jacki Weaver, BD Wong and Sarah Paulson, none of whom distinguish themselves bringing their paper thin characters to life.

Bullock and Paulson play sisters and their interactions early in the film are so forced and wooden it is stunning. To be fair, the dialogue in these exchanges is so laden with exposition it would be difficult for any actor to find signs of life within that barren wasteland.

As the film progresses it becomes populated by a rainbow of caricatures, the bitter drunken asshole with a heart of gold, the gay Asian guy with a heart of gold, the Black Iraq war vet with a heart of gold, the nerdy conspiracy novel writing guy with a heart of gold and on and on and on.

The internal logic of the film is pretty tenuous as well, with a lot of instances where you stop and go, “wait a minute…that doesn’t make sense!”…like when the Black guy with a heart of gold takes the time to put his pants on before he runs over to pick up a walkie-talkie that is signaling the first glimmer of hope for the survivors since their ordeal began, or the cavalcade of other illogical oddities that you just have to shrug at and go with if you want to keep watching.

Besides the shallow script and uneven performances, the visuals of the film are pretty lackluster. Considering that sight is a main plot point in the film, you’d think a cinematographer or director worth their salt would find a way to exploit that fact with some artistic flair, but alas with Bird Box it is not to be. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino delivers a very flat and cinematically dull film that looks like episodic television, and that is not a compliment in the slightest.

Director Susanne Bier fails to adequately draw the viewer in with either the look of the movie or an interesting perspective on the story. Once the histrionics of the collapse of society take place, the film is reduced to a stage play of stereotypes that is terribly predictable and devoid of much tension or drama.

The one thing the film does have going for it is that Sandra Bullock is a pleasant person to spend two hours with, which is really the secret to her very successful career. Bullock is always Bullock, but that is what makes her a movie star. She is a charismatic and compelling screen presence and while the film that surrounds her is derivative and trite, her presence elevates the material to at least being tolerable.

In conclusion, Bird Box is a mish-mash, fish stew of old Hollywood tropes, cliches and caricatures that never rises to its slightly alluring and intriguing premise. It fails to adequately explore the multitude of philosophical, social and/or political questions it alludes to and never successfully builds enough tension or drama to be worthwhile. It is for these reasons that I cannot recommend Bird Box in the slightest…but if you want to see a similar thriller but one that is original, skillfully made and riddled with quality performances, then wait until A Quiet Place comes out on Netflix and watch that, it will be a much better use of your limited free time.

©2018