Yeah, I had never heard of this movie either until I saw it listed in the showtimes at my local theater. But that’s normal for this time of year, as studios don’t want to risk releasing anything significant against whatever Marvel movie was just released. There is almost always a little thriller or sci-fi movie that sneaks into theaters around this time with little fanfare. In some years, that turns out to be a real gem like Ex Machina or Green Room. This is not one of those fucking years.
Here is a solid setup for a movie: A low-life named Sean and his buddy are running a scam working as valets at a fancy restaurant. When somebody drops off their expensive car, Sean directs the GPS to their home and robs them while they are eating dinner (this is also how the remake of Death Wish started, so the film moral of 2018 is that you should always murder the valet before leaving a restaurant). However, shit goes awry when Sean goes to rob one particular house and discovers a girl gagged and chained to a chair. At this point, you should turn the film off because things go to hell in a handbasket from here. Rather than trying to kill Sean, the villain enacts high-school vengeance upon him by downloading his hard drive, hacking into his Facebook, breaking up with his girlfriend and then texting topless pictures of her to everyone in her class. He even knows exactly who is sitting in her class at that very moment and texts them all simultaneously because….that’s how Facebook works? He also somehow gets both of Sean’s parents fired by framing them for workplace misconduct; the dad is found with stolen property in his truck and the mother, a nurse, for abusing a patient. What the fuck did he have on that hard drive that would make that possible? Or is there a several month time gap not acknowledged by the film in which the villain spends his days stalking Sean’s parents, waiting for that perfect moment to put some tools in his dad’s truck? What the fuck kind of psychopath does that? The fucking boring kind, that’s who does that.
Not only is all of this fucking ridiculous and petty, but the casting removes any possible tension. Sean, played by Robert Sheehan (who I never heard of before), is a whiny, incompetent pussy that succeeds only through sheer luck or by being saved by every other character (including the girl he is trying to save, who gets tired of his bumbling bullshit and just saves herself). The villain is played by David Tennant, who I had also never heard of but I’m told he is a big deal in Dr. Who circles. Maybe Tennant is a good actor, I don’t know. But I do know that he isn’t intimidating and this movie acts as if the role is being played by The fucking Undertaker, not some 140-pound Scotsman that sounds like he should be reading me a Robert Burns poem. Everybody in this movie just does what he says, even when he doesn’t have a weapon, because they are pants-shittingly scared of this guy for no fucking reason. I really think that a much larger guy was supposed to be cast in this role, but the filmmakers decided to film it the same way with Tennent and hope that nobody would notice. I noticed and spent the whole movie stupefied by the other characters’ behavior around this guy.
Not that the villain has much to worry about because the cops in this movie make the Mayberry police look like Seal Team Six. They don’t believe Sean’s story about the girl. Fair enough to be suspicious, I suppose, except for the fact that he had to fucking admit to committing burglary in order to file the police report. They care neither about the admitted burglary, the fact that Sean has been committing such burglaries for months nor the girl that he reported to be chained up in the house. I guess it was a busy morning for them. They also tell him that he needs to go to the FBI to report that the girl is missing. Couple of things: First, how the fuck can he report her missing if he doesn’t even know who she is? Second, I’ve never filed a missing person’s report, but I’m pretty sure that you don’t have to go to the FBI to do it. The movie shows us the police investigating one of the other houses that Sean robbed that night. I’m not sure why we are shown this, since the police amazingly never make a connection there. When they finally do go to the villain’s house, they never ask to see the video from one of the hundred security cameras in the house nor do they take 10 minutes to debunk the villain’s lie that he wasn’t at that restaurant that night, which he had no reason to lie about in the first fucking place.
This is also one of those movies where I had a sneaking suspicion that a whole lot of footage was cut out because subplots appear and disappear seemingly at random. When we meet our main FBI agent, she is told that she needs to let this go. Let what go? What the fuck are you taking about? I just met you fucking people! And they mention a trust fund serial killer, which I guess is our villain? Is that how he’s rich? Not sure and it’s never mentioned again. The entire rest of the film is like that, as if we had been following these FBI agents for the duration of the film and there is some backstory that we are not privy to. Speaking of backstory, this movie opens with quick images of a boy firing a gun, a girl screaming and a horse falling. After an hour of the movie, I had forgotten about that, likely writing it off as a boredom-induced hallucination. Way later in the film, we find out that the villain had a crush on a horse trainer as a kid, but she rejected him and he shot the horse (naturally). What does that have to do with anything? What’s the significance? I don’t know. I guess enjoyed shooting the horse, so then he started kidnapping women and burying them in the woods years later? What the fuck does anything have to do with anything?
You’re probably never going to see this movie and I’ve probably just written the world’s longest volume examining it. Perhaps this will be the world’s lasting, definitive record of Bad Samaritan, which would suck because I don’t know what the fuck I just watched. Future generations may now never understand why he shot that goddamn horse, but I have no more to contribute to human knowledge on the subject.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritan_(film)#/media/File:BadSamaritanFilm.jpeg
