‘Samaritan’: Stallone’s superhero on Prime Video doesn’t always work, but it’s a good variation on the genre at ground level

It is significant that virtually none of the great action movie stars of the 1980s and 1990s have made almost any superhero movies, or at least not regular superhero movies. It was a fashion that started in 1989 with ‘Batman’ (after the first and isolated impact of ‘Superman’), and they andThey were busy with movies that drank more from the action thrillers of the seventies or other trends of the moment., such as sword and sorcery, martial arts or post-Vietnam war movies. One way or another they rarely jumped on the fledgling superhero bandwagon.

And now, turned into actors limited to ironic, reflective or twilight roles, they cannot enter the morass of luminous action and visual excesses of Marvel or DC movies. For this reason, seeing Stallone handling the codes of a superhero movie is an exhilarating rarity, a kind of work out of its time whose concept (“the protagonist of ‘Rambo’ in a superhero movie!”) is corrosive from its very point of view. enunciation.

But ‘Samaritan’, which has just been released on Prime Video, is not ‘The Avengers’, but is closer to reflections after the first wave of superheroic successes, such as Shyamalan’s ‘Protected’, from where it takes aesthetic elements without any shame, like the hero camouflaged in urban environments under the hood of a sweatshirt. It is a film at ground level, extremely irregular but also very stimulatingand that displays a peculiar social message that, among other things, makes clear some shortcomings of the cinema mainstream of the genre.

Stallone stars as Joe Smith, the surly neighbor of a superhero-obsessed kid, Samaritan, who once defended the city from the outrages of the villainous Nemesis. The boy is convinced that Smith is a Samaritan and when a series of riots linked to Nemesis begin to break out in the city, he will try to convince his neighbor to go back to defending those in need.

Superheroes for the people

The most interesting thing about ‘Samaritan’ is that At no time does he deviate from the portrait of the humblest classes in whose environments the film is set. The protagonist barely sees his mother, who raises him without help and enslaved by work. Smith works as a garbage man and recovers objects from the garbage. A simple walk around the neighborhood can be an extremely dangerous activity, and tweens make a living stealing electrical cables and reselling them.

‘Samaritan’ is not particularly crude in its vision of marginalization (drugs and other forms of social alienation tools do not appear explicitly), and the tone in general (the main criminal gang is so comic that it contrasts with the crudeness with which the streets brimming with homeless) does not always accompany, but the effort is very estimable. ‘Samaritan’ does with superhero movies (where we are used to seeing lawyers, high-level scientists, high-ranking military officials and, in general, people with determined lives) what Stallone did decades ago with sports movies and ‘ Rocky’. An exhilarating twist.

Overall, ‘Samaritan’ is a film that is far from perfect: there are extremely arbitrary script decisions, the character of Joe Smith is not fully developed and the behavior of the boy protagonist is not always understood. At times confused, at times aimless, however, everything is forgiven thanks to its combative setting, which turns superheroes into heroes and antiheroes of the humblest classes, a microcosm with its own power struggles, and with a satisfying firecracker end of action and violence.

In particular, I would have preferred that ‘Samaritan’ had contained even less action but would have polished its confusing (but at times very interesting) disquisition on how good and evil become other things in environments other than heroes and class humans. medium-high that always star in the smug stories of Marvel and DC. It doesn’t quite succeed, but the whole is commendable and, above all, stimulating. At least he is not satisfied with doing the same as the rest.