Bad Samaritan (2018)

Bad Samaritan arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in being anything other than a thriller. Sean Falco, a parking valet with a sideline in burglary, breaks into the home of a wealthy patron and finds a woman chained in a back room. What follows is a cat-and-mouse contest between a working-class nobody and a trust-fund sadist who ruins lives for sport. Dean Devlin directs with the efficiency of a man who has made peace with his budget, and David Tennant chews the scenery with visible delight. It is disreputable, manipulative, and reasonably effective at what it does.

For those of us who catalogue cultural signifiers, the film is a sparse ledger. The cast includes Carlito Olivero and Tracey Heggins in supporting roles that are integrated without commentary, which is to say the film treats them as people inside a story instead of statements. Race is never raised. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental concern, no neurodivergent character, no body-positive messaging. The women fare worst: one is a captive, the other is beaten and humiliated by a leaked photograph, and the film offers no framework to object. The villain's inherited money supplies a faint whiff of class resentment, though it is a genre convention, not an argument. Preaching is entirely absent. This is a film that wants your armrest, not your conscience.

The result is a curious artifact: a 2018 release that behaves like a 1998 one. Its cultural awareness is negligible, its sermonizing nonexistent, and its ambitions strictly commercial. The eighth-worst wide opening in history suggests audiences agreed there was nothing here to rally behind. We are left with a modest, nasty little thriller, competently assembled, ideologically inert. There are worse things to be.