Bad Samaritan

Take a deep breath: this isn’t going to be easy.  You’re going about, doing your thing, living your life on your own terms.  You may not have much money, but you’ve got the love of a great gal.  One day your photographic eye will be recognized, but for now you’ve gotta get to what one could lightly call your “job” parking cars at the local Italian restaurant.  Of course, we know what you’re doing on the sly, don’t we?  C’mon, don’t be like that, own it, dude.  We all know you’re taking the cars for a quick spin to the rich folks’ houses and ripping them off.  Hey, some of them likely deserve it, yeah?  Especially this asshat driving up in a spiffy Maserati and throwin’ some attitude.  You take your turn, leaving your boy to hold down the fort, and head over to this dude’s pristine mansion (Portland’s already gentrifying heavily, but this place is something else, lemme tell ya).  Score! you’ve got some niiiice stuff here.  Oooh, wait a sec, this upstairs door’s got a massive lock on it.  Office?  Maybe.  Gotta know.  There’s the key, let’s see.  Alright, let’s jack this guy’s passwords and HOLY HELL WHAT JUST JUMPED OUT OF THE DARKNESS!?  It’s a girl!  She’s strapped, chained to a chair!  She looks like she’s been through the ringer something fierce.  Gotta help her, right?  Can’t just leave her there, right?  Who knows what this psycho’ll do to her when he gets back?

Aaaand scene.

Quite the setup, yeah?  Sounds like some intensity is imminent.

NOPE.  So much nope.

Honestly, this thing starts out well enough, establishing our ne’er-do-well protagonist rather well, putting him in a tense situation, even creating some initial pieces of fun confusion.  Hell, I even felt compelled to yell “Can I get a Witness?” at the screen near the beginning (don’t worry, I was alone).  Unfortunately, it seems as though director Dean Devlin has spent far too much time with hackjob-artist extraordinaire Roland Emmerich (Independence Day can’t buoy you guys forever, I’m afraid), and writer Brandon Boyce has reverted to focusing on the bad parts of screenwriting (just try to remember the awful bits of his Apt Pupil and you’ll get the idea).  Trust me, this thing turned out so poorly that I don’t even want you to be able to get the joke I made a sentence ago.  Seriously, don’t see this film.  Just don’t.  Anti-Nike the idea.

Let’s start with the acting.  Aside from antagonist David Tennant, I didn’t recognize anyone immediately, but lead Robert Sheehan (who was apparently in Geostorm, so I guess I really didn’t pay any attention to that bomb) did rather well.  Everyone else was either just hitting their spots, sleepwalking, or overdoing it.  Guess which one Tennant is guilty of?  G’head.  If you said “overdoing it”, you took the easy route and lucked out.  Congrats, at least you didn’t have to sit through this thing.  Yeah, it pains me to say that Tennant, sans accent (he just doesn’t sound right without it), is trying way too hard to be a crazy guy here, winding up chewing the scenery without much glee to be had on our part.  He tries to toe the line between overly-calm psychotic a la early-film Patrick Bateman and unhinged looney (like, well, late-movie Bateman, I guess), but it just doesn’t work.

Of course, he’s completely hamstrung by an absolutely abysmal script, so there wasn’t much for him to do, really.  The premise Boyce lays out is, like I said, actually pretty interesting, putting a bit of a spin on Don’t Breathe, but interest peters out rather quickly as Boyce devolves into police procedural cliches and the most ridiculous of crime novel eccentricities and contrivances.  At one point, our lead asks his partner in crime if he knows how to use the knife he just pulled out.  What kind of question is that?  I actually yelled toward the screen, “The pointy end goes into the other man,” hoping the sarcastic Mask of Zorro reference would land with the actors.  Not exactly, but, regardless, what kind of line is that?  Later on, near the end, Boyce has the audacity to toss in a one-liner and some mild humor during a scene whose tone calls for the exact opposite.  Indeed, Boyce’s tone fluctuates throughout the film, mostly trying for some genuine tension (and failing) but peppering in plenty of smarmy and ludicrous moments, just enough to ruin the atmosphere.

Devlin and his crew are little help.  Alongside some edgelord grimness and implied sadism, we’re treated to one of the protagonists being chased around a kitchen island by a doberman, screaming and flailing about as though Jerry Lewis had turned up on set and demanded a tribute (that would explain that bit…).  The music is tuned to overactive melodrama, constantly building to monumental crescendos of warbling to attempt some tension-building.  That might have worked, had they not done it so many times that our brains developed a mental callous against it.  A decent handful of jump-scares are thrown in to keep us on edge, but they’re so contrived and obvious that no one in the audience could be fooled into falling for them.  Indeed, the reveal I posited in the opening paragraph is executed through a massive contrivance wherein our lead boy enters a dark room and does his thing at the computer without turning the lights on (seems legit), allowing the girl, who for some reason remains silent for a few initial minutes, to come out of nowhere and shock him, complete with loud music sting, a living screamer video.

The worst aspect, though, is the wasted potential and ludicrosity of explanation.  They had a pretty solid foundation for something interesting, but they went so far off the reservation that I question why they even bothered to begin with.  See, the opening shots (cobbled together into a purposefully barely-coherent mess) allude to some Equus-style horse issues with our villain, and he kinda hearkens back to this idea throughout, but once we find out why, we’re left scratching our heads as to how he got this far.  In life.  Seriously.  They try to make him out to be some genius killer who thinks of everything and is capable of just about anything, but for once I join the chorus of people proclaiming that I wouldn’t have had an issue with this lunatic.  And that’s quite the insult, believe you me.  Had they just left more to the imagination, focused more on the mind games between Tennant and Sheehan, rather than the former’s way-too-visible-to-us machinations, it would have made for a quality thriller, the audience constantly wondering how Sheehan will overcome his newest challenge.  Instead, we get Devlin and Boyce trying too hard to evoke Stieg Larsson and Thomas Harris and falling flat on their talentless faces.

This is The Snowman if that film had been completed and still wound up sucking.  Despite some promise, nothing works, and by the end, the only appropriate response is angry venting.  You better believe I did it, and loudly.  As I said before, don’t see this.  It’s not even done in a way that some ironic fun could be had with it, though I could see such a scenario working out if plenty of booze was involved.  This is a horrendous film, and, having seen it, I understand why I’d never heard of it at all until it was released:  Clearly they didn’t want anyone to know about it ahead of time, lest they find out its dirty, incompetent secrets.  Just stay away.

I need a stiff drink, kids.