A nugget of originality
Naughty scheme, david tennant best things about BAD samaritan
Bad Samaritan may be a forgettable thriller, but it does feature one original idea amid a jumble of genre clichés that include scary music, pounding drums, jump scares, the slowest-opening garage door ever and people who just. Won’t. Die.
The spark of originality is the scheme concocted by Sean (Robert Sheehan) and his pal Derek (Carlito Olivero). Working as valets at an Italian restaurant in Portland, they regularly use diners’ cars to drive to diners’ homes, which they rob of small items that won’t be immediately noticed.
These second-rate criminals make a first-rate score when a wealthy guy (David Tennant, looking pasty, mean and VERY intense) rolls up in a Maserati. Sean heads over to the man’s house and finds a black American Express card — yippee! And a woman chained up in the study — uh oh.
He panics and flees without rescuing the woman, then thinks better and calls the cops. But this gives Tennant’s character time to cover his tracks; even when the investigating officer tries to Columbo him on the way out the door with “one last question,” Tennant doesn’t crack. He just coolly goes about with the business of revenge.
Bad Samaritan was written by Brandon Boyce (the 2005 horror movie Venom) and directed by Dean Devlin (last year’s Geostorm), which means it’s already better than you have any reason to suspect. And sure, it’s just a vanilla variant on the old they-messed-with-thewrong-guy movie. But Ireland’s Sheehan does a good job selling his character’s frantic hunt for justice. And Tennant, who will never fully shuffle off the mantle of three years as Doctor Who, really gets his evil on. One of his character’s quirks is making threatening phone calls and then dropping the phone out the car window; it’s a wonderful punctuation mark, so much better than pressing the END button.
The script does get a little messy at times — there are numerous police and FBI officers with varying degrees of credulity for Sean’s story, some clunky exposition to explain why this Irish kid is knocking about in Oregon, and a fair bit of setup for Sean’s girlfriend (Jacqueline Byers) and parents, which you’ll eventually realize is just so the crazy bad guy will have someone else on whom to exact his crazy badness.
It staggers between logic and illogic, eventually collapsing just far enough on the right side of the line to make this an entertaining bit of time-wasting; the consistent slow build means the longer you invest in it, the better the payoff. Best of all, this modern parable will ensure that if you ever find a kidnap victim while committing a robbery, you’ll do the right thing.