|
Bad Samaritan - 2/4
A formulaic, humourless take on the "wrong one to fuck with" genre. I spent a lot of this film's duration thinking about how fantastic "Don't Breathe" was and wondering how many revenge thrillers lead by anti-heroes there were. This one is as generic as they come. Robbing the wrong guy. Why the wrong guy? He's a bad guy.
Stylistically it's derivative and appears to be more horror in tone than thriller however there are no effective scares and very little in the way of tension. I think a better effort could have been made with regards to the story structure and casting. I find it hard to sympathise with wankers and idiots and your protagonists are both. Kerry Condon is good, but Kerry Condon is always good. I find it hard to understand why this was made. This is a film without any substance or weight and it suffers from extremely bad character development, paint by numbers direction and a lack of addition to the already tired concept.
David Tennant obviously wanted to play against type and it's a pity that he looked sinister enough to be interesting and then was given nothing to do besides the usual charming psycho routine.
I suppose if you have never seen a revenge thriller with an antihero protagonist then this may entertain but amongst the other genre titles this is just a step above Death Wish 3 and a fair few down from Don't Breathe or even the new Death Wish remake.
|