Samaritan (2022)

Extend a shrug of respect to Julius Avery's Samaritan, a 2022 superhero picture that arrived on Prime Video with the quiet dignity of a film nobody fought over. Granite City is broke, the power is out, and Sylvester Stallone is a garbage collector with an aching back and a secret. The screenplay notices poverty: eviction notices, unemployment, a thirteen-year-old taking work from a street gang to keep the lights on. That hardship registers as texture, never as argument. The film never builds a case against the system that produced it, which keeps its economic complaint at the level of atmosphere, a sad apartment with bad wiring.

Representation here is casual in the way casting often is. Javon Walton carries the picture as Sam, Dascha Polanco plays his mother, Moisés Arias drifts past as muscle, and nobody announces any of it. The restraint is worth something, though it also means the film has no argument to make about race and no interest in making one. Tiffany exists to be kidnapped and to look worried. She is a plot device with a mortgage. There is no queer presence, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent character, no weather to speak of. The environmental crisis in Granite City is a blackout, not a matter of conscience.

The mythology is invented wholesale, twin superhumans and a sledgehammer, which spares us any revision of the historical record. What remains is a closing speech from Joe about good and evil residing in every person, delivered with the gravity of a fortune cookie. It is a moral, not a sermon. The rest is punching, competently staged and instantly forgotten. The film wants credit for darkness and settles for dim lighting. One can admire the economy of a ninety-minute runtime without mistaking it for conviction, and Samaritan, for all its brooding, has very little to say and says it politely. A modest specimen. Filed accordingly.