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Bad Samaritan
(out of 4) Starring David Tennant, Robert Sheehan, Kerry Condon and Carlito Olivero. Directed by Dean Devlin. Written by Brandon Boyce. Opens Friday at GTA cinemas. 110 minutes. If nothing else, Bad Samaritan might serve as a promo for smart homes. Villain Cale (David Tennant) can operate just about anything inside his luxury house from his phone or laptop, even start the timer on a bomb.
Tennant — the Scottish actor best known for TV’s Doctor
Who — is a reliably magnetic screen presence and he gives Cale an icy sense of menace, but the script by Brandon Boyce ( Apt Pupil, Wicker Park) doesn’t give him much to work with.
This one’s directed by Dean Devlin, best known as a producer of the Independence Day movies and the supernatural TV series The Librarians. In it, rich heir Cale is holding a woman (Kerry Condon) captive inside his house, a fact that’s discovered by Sean (Robert Sheehan), an aspiring art photographer who makes his money stealing from customers of the restaurant where he works as a valet — which is how he uncovers Cale’s secret.
Sean tries to do the right thing by involving police, but Cale has cleared away all the evidence by the time they come calling and then decides to get even by victimizing Sean and everyone he cares about.
Cale and Sean engage in a battle of wits using both cyber attacks and good old-fashioned violence, but we can see the twists coming a mile away, some of them telegraphed by a heavy-handed use of music.
The story also exploits common horror tropes like bodies that don’t stay dead, in one case ridiculously so. And is it not glaringly obvious that someone who walks down a deserted alleyway alone is going to meet with disaster?
The main issue is that we’re not given enough context to understand the characters’ motivations or care much about their eventual fates.
It’s obvious that Cale is one seriously twisted dude: he makes his victim bathe using soaps and lotions in a precise order with carefully prescribed motions, for instance, but is disgusted when she offers him her body.
Yet we don’t get a sense of why he is the way he is beyond a throwaway line about a childhood incident involving a horse.
Unfortunately, a bad Samaritan does not a good movie make.