Mark Reviews Movies: BAD SAMARITAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 4, 2018

Like its title, Bad Samaritan is both kind of clever and kind of dumb. It wouldn't be accurate to say that the movie possesses those characteristics in equal parts, because its story, about a thief who accidentally finds himself in a cat-and-mouse battle of wits with a serial killer, is inherently both smart and goofy. Whether or not screenwriter Brandon Boyce and director Dean Devlin recognize the goofiness of this material is an item worthy of some debate. The case could be made for either option.

The argument against that awareness is the multitude of scenes that take this story quite seriously. In favor of the filmmakers' knowledge is a single line during the climactic showdown, when a character, who has spent the entirety of the movie as a dehumanized plot device, chides the hero for his decidedly unheroic actions. A movie without even the slightest awareness of its silliness wouldn't even consider such a brazen attack on how poorly its protagonist has handled matters, essentially pointing out that he has been useless from the start. There's that, then.

At first, the story plays out as a moral dilemma. Our protagonist, an Irish starving artist living in Portland named Sean (Robert Sheehan), has taken up a life of crime to pay the bills. His partner is Derek (Carlito Olivero), and the two run a valet service outside a local restaurant.

It's a front, though, to gain access to an unsuspecting diner's cars and keys, find the owner's address, and rob the person blind while their enjoying a meal. From the start, we know that Sean isn't a conscienceless thief, considering how he promises that a risqué photo of his girlfriend Riley (Jacqueline Byers) is only for him and how he has qualms about Derek robbing the home of a seemingly nice family.

The perfect target arrives in the personage of Cale Erendreich (a slithering David Tennant), a luxury-car-driving jerk whose very nature screams that he's the kind of guy who won't make Sean feel guilty about stealing from him. Everything at Cale's house seems to be going well, until he discovers a dark secret in the rich guy's pitch-black, tarp-covered office: a woman named Katie (Kerry Condon) who's chained to a chair, gagged, and covered in bruises. In a room adjoining Cale's garage, there's what amounts to an abattoir—tools, mechanical saws, and an obvious splattering of blood near the blades.

Sean's choice, of course, is whether he should call the cops, essentially giving himself up in the process of committing a crime (Under the circumstances, it's difficult to believe that any jury would give him more than a slap on the wrist, if that), or just leave this woman to the twisted whims of a killer. He splits the difference, bringing the car back to a waiting Cale and making an anonymous call to the police. Cale catches on to Sean's discovery and decides to make a secondary game of turning the thief's life into a living hell.

Cale's game is rather devious. It has little to do with threats of or actual physical violence against Sean (Provided with the perfect opportunity to kill his prey, Cale just pantomimes firing his pistol, taking pleasure in the possibility and his restraint). Instead, the killer turns Sean's turn-of-conscience against him, convincing the police that nothing is amiss in his house, either because of a woman being held in captivity or even the fact that he was robbed. The local police start to suspect that Sean is playing a prank on either them or Cale, and the FBI is reluctant to let Sean know if they're going to take his claims seriously. Meanwhile, Cale starts to pick apart at Sean's relationships and his family's financial stability.

What can be said is that Sean, for all of his uncertainty in those early moments when time and decisive action are of the essence, is that he's determined to do the right thing. He's also not quite as stupid as we might expect within the confines of a thriller like this, following the proper, if useless, steps to do something about Cale and evading the killer's grasp with some quick, if basic, thinking when necessary. Sheehan is effective in the role, playing Sean as a basically decent guy who's desperate to atone for his terrible choice upon finding Katie.

Cale, though, is a different matter, and it's tough to reconcile the notion of a cold-blooded, psychologically damaged serial killer perpetrating what amounts to a series of elaborate, sometimes violent jokes on the one person who could be his undoing. There's little logic to his behavior, although Boyce attempts to resolve the apparent contradiction in the murderous Cale's approach to Sean with a back-heavy explanation of the killer's pathology. None of that expository dialogue can justify the tried and tired cliché of the villain who decides to provide a lengthy monologue, just at the moment of his final victory.

Essentially, we have a reversal of the norm here: a thriller with a dumb villain and a smarter-than-usual hero. That makes the early stages of the game in Bad Samaritan, in which Sean has to fight a system that assumes the worst of him, cleverly entertaining. It also makes the later stages, in which Cale's attacks become harder to rationalize, just downright goofy.

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