Review: 'Samaritan,' starring Sylvester Stallone as a superhero in decline, is an idiotic mess of an action movie

The idiotic action movie “Samaritan” is proof that “straight to streaming” is this generation’s “direct to DVD” — an indicator that a famous face on the box art isn’t enough to guarantee anything interesting within.

The famous face here is Sylvester Stallone, who plays Joe Smith, a garbageman who tries to keep to himself in his neighborhood on the seedier side of the fictional Granite City. One person who does notice Joe is Sam Cleary (Javon “Wanna” Walton), a 13-year-old kid who spends his days trying to dodge a gang-banging weasel, Reza (Moises Arias) and his cohorts — who all work for the area crime boss, Cyrus (Pilou Asbaek, formerly of “Game of Thrones”).

When Joe finds Sam getting beaten up, and tosses Reza and his pals to the farthest walls of the alley, Sam has an epiphany: That Joe must be Samaritan, the Granite City superhero who disappeared from the scene 20 years earlier, after reportedly killing his brother and main nemesis, called Nemesis, to prevent an evil plan being launched on the city. Joe denies that he’s Samaritan, but the feats of strength and tolerance for pain are telling a different story.

Meanwhile, Cyrus is amassing big weaponry for an evil plan of his own. A key to that plan is stealing Nemesis’ old mask and his weapon, a sledgehammer that is supposed to be the only thing that can kill Samaritan.

The script, by Bragi F. Schut (who co-wrote “Escape Room”), is loaded with placeholder characters — people with a handful of traits in search of a well-rounded personality. The prime example is Sam’s mom (Dascha Polanco), who we know only as an emergency-room nurse who’s always pulling a double shift. That’s about all the script gives Polanco, or us, to work with, and it’s a credit to Polanco that she can keep from laughing at the string of cliches she’s supposed to project.

Director Julius Avery (“Overlord”) manages to string together a few solid action sequences, which is no small feat when your star is 76 years old and not moving like he did in his Rocky Balboa days. 

But any sophistication in the production side is undercut by sketchy plot mechanics and some astoundingly bad performances — namely from Asbaek, but also Arias and Martin Starr as a bookstore owner with his own red-stringed wall of Samaritan sightings. One wonders what it might have taken to bring the material up to snuff, but the answer is the difference between a streaming service and a real movie studio.

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‘Samaritan’

★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, August 26, on Prime. Rated PG-13 for strong violence and strong language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Breaking' gives John Boyega a meaty character in a veteran at his low point, but there's too much going on around him

A strong ensemble cast — led by John Boyega, Nicole Beharie and the late Michael K. Williams — can’t quite overcome the narrative confusion of director Abi Damaris Corbin’s “Breaking,” which tries to examine a real-life hostage incident from a few too many angles.

Bodega plays Brian Brown-Easley, who walks into a Wells Fargo branch in Marietta, Ga., one summer morning in 2017 to withdraw some cash. He banters, charmingly and politely, with a teller, Rosa Diaz (Selenis Leyva) — but the banter stops when Brian hands Rosa a note with four words on it: “I have a bomb.”

Across the bank floor, manager Estel Valerie (Beharie) sees something is brewing, and starts quietly telling customers and coworkers to get out of the building. By the time Brian gets loud with his demands, only Estel and Rosa are left in the bank, and the police are on their way.

Outside the bank, the predictable scene unfolds. Squad cars, followed by SWAT teams, the police chief (Robb Derringer) talking to reporters, helicopters flying overhead, and a sniper looking for a clear shot. The officer leading the response, Maj. Riddick (Jeffrey Donovan), argues with the lead negotiator, Sgt. Eli Bernard — played by Williams in one of his last movie roles; he died in September 2021 — who eventually talks to Brian and learns they have something in common: They both served as Marines.

Brian explains to Estel and Rosa, and to anyone who will listen, that he doesn’t want the bank’s money. Rather, he wants the monthly disability check he gets from the Veterans Administration, which was unfairly diverted to pay down a debt he said he had already paid.

Through the ordeal, the phone is a lifeline for Brian. He tries to reach his ex, Cassandra (Olivia Washington), and their daughter, Kiah (London Covington). And he gets in touch with a local TV producer (played by Connie Britton), who sympathetically tries to interview Brian and hook up to Eli and the police.

Boyega gives a dynamic performance as the ex-Marine at the end of his rope, and he’s best matched with Beharie as the bank manager trying to keep her fear in check, and Williams as the negotiator trying to make sure everyone gets out alive — no sure thing when most of the people outside the bank are cops with guns.

The problem with “Breaking” is that Corbin and her co-screenwriter, playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, try to cram all those side stories into the film, and only a few of them rise above the cacophony. In the process, the movie’s message — something about how systems can crush people’s spirits, particularly when those people are of color — gets lost in the noise.

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‘Breaking’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 26, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violent content, and strong language. Running time: 102 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 23, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival (under the title “892”).

Review: 'Beast' is a bloody survival tale of humans vs. a lion, where the action comes from the characters' bad decisions.

The survival drama “Beast” is, like its title creature, lean and fast and brutal — an action thriller where people tend to act because it’s the dramatically interesting thing to do, if not always the smartest.

Idris Elba stars as Dr. Nate Samuels, an American doctor who’s on vacation with his teen daughters, Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries), on safari in South Africa. They’re going to a remote area, at the village where Nate’s wife was born. She and Nate divorced, and she died of cancer before a hoped-for reconciliation — a bone of contention with the daughters, particularly Meredith, who has taken up her mother’s interest in photography.

Greeted by Nate’s old friend, Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley), the Samuels family gets the VIP tour of the savanna, even encountering a pride of lions. Martin is friendly with the two male lions in the pride, and advises Meredith and Norah that in the pride, the women hunt while the men protect the pride. Martin also informs the family of another threat in the area: Poachers who have made an industry of killing lions for their teeth, claws and bones.

At a nearby village, they make a gruesome discovery: Many dead bodies, apparently killed by a large male lion. That lion — his pride having been killed by poachers — seems to seek revenge on humans, and attacks the SUV with the Samuels family inside it.

If this scenario feels like a Liam Neeson movie, know that screenwriter Ryan Engle also wrote two Neeson action vehicles, “Non-Stop” and “The Commuter.” The plot contours, particularly the climactic man-vs.-animal battle, also feel taken from “The Grey,” in which Neeson famously punched a wolf.

Director Baltasar Kormákur (“Everest,” “2 Guns”) has a knack for making action sequences that move with dynamic energy, even if they’re predicated on bad decisions. (This movie sets some kind of record for people running away from the car after being told “stay in the car.”) The movie is exciting in the moment, even if it doesn’t hold up to rational scrutiny.

The far-fetched nature of the story is worth sitting through if it means watching Elba to kick butt while showing his sensitive side as a trying-to-be-engaged divorced dad. Elba brings a needed weight to a movie that could, if left unchecked, veer into ridiculousness as the computer-animated lions attack.

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‘Beast’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 19, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for violent content, bloody images and some language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'My Old School' is a documentary that tells an odd yarn, cleverly using animation and re-enactment.

A peculiar story is told in a peculiar way in “My Old School,” a documentary in which the alumni of a Glasgow high school recall an unusual classmate.

Brandon Lee wasn’t like most of the students at Bearsden Academy when he enrolled in 1993. He seemed more mature than the others, more confident, and also a good deal smarter. He fit in well, was admired by the teachers, and wowed the class by auditioning for one of the lead roles in the school’s musical, “South Pacific.”

It took two years to reveal what was off about Brandon Lee — besides him having the same name as an  actor who had died on the set of “The Crow” earlier that year. The truth was that Brandon Lee was actually named Brian McKinnon, he was 32, and he had been a student at Bearsden Academy in the mid-‘70s, though many of the teachers who were still around 20 years later didn’t recognize him.

Director Jono McLeod interviews a fair number of Bearsden alumni, who recount their impressions of this odd but personable classmate. McLeod also interviews Lee/McKinnon, but the one-time hoaxer allowed only his voice to be recorded, not his face.

How McLeod gets around that limitation is somewhat inspired. He hired an actor to lip-sync the audio of the interview. But not just any actor — the part is performed by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming (“Cabaret,” “The Good Wife”), who in the ‘90s had been cast to play McKinnon in a movie about the incident, a movie that was never made because the subject backed out.

Two more layers of artifice McLeod adds to the mix: He interviews all the Bearsden alums on a set that resembles a school classroom (the original school was torn down in 2010), and he uses animation to re-enact scenes described by the interview subjects. (Fans of the MTV show “Daria” may find the thickly lined look of the animated characters a bit familiar.)

McLeod lets the story roll out naturally, the way it did for the other Bearsden students, letting the revelations unfold naturally. By the end of “My Old School,” all the questions a viewer might want to ask have been answered — as well as a few the viewer probably didn’t consider.

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‘My Old School’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Bodies Bodies Bodies' is a sly satire of millennials, cloaked as a tense horror thriller

Equally nasty and funny, the horror-thriller “Bodies Bodies Bodies” is the sort of smart, snarky whodunnit that works because nearly every character is so unlikeable that audiences will be satisfied no matter who the killer is, or who gets killed.

A bunch of rich 20-somethings are planning to ride out a hurricane warning by partying in a mansion. The home is owned by the parents of the perpetually sarcastic Dave (Pete Davidson), who’s accompanied by his actress girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders). Alice (Rachel Sennott), who recently started her own podcast, has brought her new boyfriend, the mellow and much older Greg (Lee Pace). Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) is flying solo for this party, without her boyfriend Max (Conner O’Malley).

A late arrival, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg), Dave’s best friend since childhood, comes in with her girlfriend of six weeks, Bee (Maria Bakalova). Dave and Alice are more enthused about Sophie’s presence than Jordan and Emma, for reasons that become clearer as the night goes on.

Amid the party games, it’s Sophie who suggests they play Bodies Bodies Bodies, and — over the objections of Emma, who notes that the game always ends with people getting mad or crying — they proceed. The game goes like this: The guests draw lots, with one randomly assigned as the killer, who must “kill” another player in the dark, and then the lights come up and the players must vote on who the killer is. They play a round, and as predicted, the session ends with hurt feelings and arguments.

Not too long after that, one of the partygoers ends up dead for real, and everyone else is left trying to figure out who did it. Recriminations, accusations and suspicions start to pile up — as do the bodies, as the death count goes up and the number of suspects goes down.

Dutch director Halina Reijn, making her English-language debut, works with ruthless efficiency, using the cramped geography of the mansion to ratchet up the tension. Rookie screenwriter Sarah DeLappe’s script, adapted from a Kristen Roupenian story, plays on the modern obsession with sensitivity in language — with mentions of gaslighting, enabling and other buzzwords — to create scathing comedy and murderous tension.

The ensemble cast makes it work, playing against each other to heighten the suspense and make the jokes sting. Davidson, recently off his “Saturday Night Live” stint, and Pace engage in a sly game of toxic masculine jealousy, the real fun comes from the women — particularly Stenberg (“The Hate U Give”), Bakalova (from “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”) and particularly Sennott (“Shiva Baby”), who’s the stealth comedy MVP as the friend desperate to prove she’s not a frivolous member of the group.

“Bodies Bodies Bodies” isn’t perfect; for one thing, the clockworks mechanics of the plot don’t always land right, particularly in the final reel. But as a biting satire of millennial interpersonal strife, it strikes a distinctive chord.  

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‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’

★★★

Opening Friday, August 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence, bloody images, drug use, sexual references and pervasive language. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Secret Headquarters' is a bland attempt at making a kid-friendly spy action movie

The kid-targeted action movie “Secret Headquarters” is a bland and uninteresting attempt to meld two oddball ideas — “Spy Kids” and “The Greatest American Hero” — and missing the boat entirely.

The prologue shows a typical family — Jack (Owen Wilson) and Lily (Jessie Mueller) and their 4-year-old son, Charlie (Louie Chaplin Moss) — on a camping trip. Then they witness a military plane collide with a UAP, an “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” or a UFO. Jack drives the family’s VW microbus to the crash site, where he meets the downed pilot, Capt. Sean Irons (Jesse Williams). They then encounter an alien probe, which scans both men, and chooses Jack as “Guardian.”

Flash-forward 10 years. Jack and Lily have divorced, and Charlie, now 14 (and played by Walker Scobell) feels like a neglected son because of all of his dad’s emergency business trips. Charlie instead obsesses over a shadowy superhero known as The Guard, who’s constantly rescuing people and averting crisis situations around the globe. The Guard’s identity is a mystery, one that Ansel Argon (Michael Peña), a billionaire defense contractor, wants desperately to find — having hired Irons to lead the global search for The Guard’s power source.

Charlie visits Jack for his birthday, and is unsurprised when his dad has to leave at the last minute. Charlie takes advantage of the situation, and invites his buddy Berger (Kevin L. Williams) over to play video games, and Berger brings over two girls from their middle-school class: Social-media obsessive Lizzie (Abby James Witherspoon), and recent transfer student Maya (Momona Tamada), on whom Charlie had a crush when they were in fifth grade.

The kids soon discover that Jack’s house has some extra features — namely an elevator that goes to a massive underground lair loaded with tons of alien technology. The other kids figure out what Charlie can’t bring himself to believe: That this is the headquarters of The Guard, and that Jack is The Guard.

The kids start playing with The Guard’s gadgets, which Irons and his team detect. Soon, Irons and Argon’s team of mercenaries are infiltrating the headquarters, and it’s up to the kids to defend The Guard’s secrets.

The directing team of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman — who made “Catfish,” “Nerve” and “Project Power” — rewrote a much-handled script, and it’s hard to see if they improved on it. What’s on the screen are by-the-numbers fight scenes, a few lame jokes, and predictable heart-to-heart conversations between father and son. Any fan watching this on Paramount+ could, with a few days’ work, write a script of equal quality.

Viewers might recognize Scobell for a similar role — a pre-teen scarred by an absentee dad — in the time-travel Netflix action movie “The Adam Project.” (He was the young version of Ryan Reynolds character.) His chemistry here with Wilson is slightly better than what he had opposite Mark Ruffalo in that movie, but that’s probably attributable to Wilson’s laid-back charms.

The annoying part of “Secret Headquarters” is how Paramount saw it coming. The studio originally set this movie up for a theatrical run, and only in June announced it would debut on its streaming service. Consider it a blessing, that we can ignore “Secret Headquarters” in the privacy of our own homes, rather than blowing money on movie tickets for it.

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‘Secret Headquarters’

★★

Starts streaming Friday, August 12, on Paramount+. Rated PG for violence, action, language and some rude humor. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Summering' is an uneven look at girls having one last adventure on the cusp of middle-school maturity

The pre-teen drama “Summering” aims to capture a particular moment — the last gasps of childhood, before the horrors of middle school force kids to grow up in a hurry — and is so earnest in its pursuit that it’s rather sad that the movie self-sabotages its own best intentions with an unfortunate plot choice.

It’s the last weekend in August before four 11-year-old girls, who live on the same street and are friends largely because of that geography, are about to be separated as each starts middle school at a different school. The four — science-minded Dina (Madalen Mills), spiritual-minded Lola (Sanai Victoria), nervous good girl Mari (Eden Grace Redfield), and quiet Daisy (Lia Barnett) — go to their favorite place, a tree near an overpass that they’ve decorated and call Terabithia, for one last time this summer.

Near their tree, Daisy finds something else: A dead body. It’s a man, in a suit, apparently a suicide — jumping form the overpass, 100 feet above.

(Side note: This movie was filmed in Utah, where I live, and the actor who plays the corpse is a guy I know slightly; he used to work at The Salt Lake Tribune, where I work.)

The girls, too young to have ever seen “Stand By Me,” decide to solve the mystery of the dead man. Who was he? How did he end up like this? As the girls begin their sleuthing, the movie drops clues for the audience to piece together the girls’ issues with their mothers. 

Daisy has the toughest backstory: Her father disappeared a year earlier, and her police officer mother, Laura (Lake Bell), has been emotionally out of action ever since. Mari’s mom, Stacie (Megan Mullally), is a helicopter mom, even monitoring Mari’s cellphone usage. We also meet Karna (Sarah Cooper), Lola’s painter mom, and Joy (Ashley Madekwe), Dina’s mom, who keeps close track of Dina’s progress on her summer reading list.

Director James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “The End of the Tour”), co-writing with Benjamin Percy, neatly distills a particular vibe — that of these pre-teen girls, trying to hold on to their girlhood while knowing that the pressures of adulthood, from puberty to rebelling against their parents, are just around the corner. In its quieter moments, when the movie just allows the four young actresses to be themselves, the movie achieves that.

Alas, those moments are shoehorned into a more pedestrian narrative, driven by the detective playacting into the dead man’s identity. There are also some problematic script choices — none worse than having Daisy sneak her mom’s pistol into her backpack. 

The imbalance between the sincere moments and the forced ones throws “Summering” off track, making a potentially heartfelt movie into an intermittently interesting one.

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‘Summering’

★★1/2

Opening Friday, August 12, at the Megaplex at The District (South Jordan) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated PG-13 for some thematic material. Running time: 87 minutes.

Review: 'Free Chol Soo Lee' is an engrossing look at a murder case, and a movement for civil rights that was bigger than the man at the center

In the documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee,” filmmakers Eugene Yi and Julie Ha examine how a movement among Asian Americans to battle injustice emerged from one man’s troubled life.

In 1973, Chol Soo Lee was a 20-year-old Korean immigrant living in San Francisco’s Chinatown, with a criminal record. After a man was shot dead in a Chinatown intersection, part of an ongoing gang war. Cops arrested Lee, and he was tried and convicted — based on the testimony of white tourists who later admitted they couldn’t distinguish Asian features — and given a life sentence in San Quentin.

Four years into his prison term, he was attacked by a member of a white gang, whom he killed in what his lawyers argued was self-defense. An all-white jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to the gas chamber in San Quentin.

While he was in prison, activists began to mount a campaign to free Lee, to expose the racism and shoddy detective work in the San Francisco Police Department. The campaign became a unifying event among Asian Americans in California and across the country. It helped that Lee was a charismatic interview subject, handsome and smiling as he discussed the wrong done to him by the system.

Yi and Ha have compiled a wealth of archival material, and fresh interviews with the people involved in the campaign — the most compelling being Ranko Yamada, a friend of Lee’s before his arrest, who went to law school and became a lawyer so she could be fight for Lee’s freedom and other cases of injustice.

Lee’s voice is heard in interviews, and in writings narrated by Sebastian Yoon. His words paint a portrait of a man who felt almost cursed in life, both before his arrest and through his imprisonment.

The film works because it finds the tricky balance between describing Lee’s hard life and exploring how his prison experience inspired a movement that was bigger than he was — and how he struggled to live up to those expectations.

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‘Free Chol Soo Lee’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 12, at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for descriptions and images of violence, and references to drug use and sexual assault. Running time: 86 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this website on January 24, 2022, when the film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.