Review of Bad Samaritan (2018) by Thomas K — 07 Aug 2018

From the director of Geostorm (2017) and writer of Independence Day (1996), Bad Samaritan is the follow-up to Dean Devlin's Geostorm. Starring the underrated actors Robert Sheehan and David Tennant, Bad Samaritan follows a young Irish-American immigrant who uses his status as a valet to obtain the home location of unsuspecting drivers through their car GPS systems to rob their homes. Upon stumbling into the home of a serial killer, the young man unwittingly drops head-first into the middle of a spider's web for a cat-and-mouse game of manipulation.

Understanding the low depths of Dean Devlin as a writer (and now director), one must come to the table with low expectations if any at all to find enjoyment in his work, especially given his tendency to overindulge idiocy in plot, story and character. From the perspective of his two-decades long career, Bad Samaritan is one of his better entries but still a weak, generic thriller based purely on well-established genre tropes, typical characterizations, and dumb character mistakes done only for narrative reasons and implausibility. Throughout the entertaining yet nevertheless mediocre cinematic journey, one can't escape the feeling one can find better story/script writers on street corners.

Equipped with a predictable plot and David Tennant's hammy, overacting, Bad Samaritan slightly exceeds forgettable serial thrillers (i.e.: The Watcher, 80 Minutes, Solace) yet is far afield from the Hitchcockian procedural masterwork of David Fincher's Se7en (1995) or Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). For all of its improvements over Devlin's previous debacle Geostorm, Bad Samaritan is still a low-IQ bargain bin version of Don't Breathe that makes Red Dragon (2002), Brett Ratner's bastardization of Manhunter (1985), look like a masterpiece. Enjoy!