Samaritan

At 76, Sylvester Stallone is still making movies. And after spending time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, Stallone is finally ...

Again, there's potential here for a populist street leader to rally the population with a vicious Robin Hood routine that adds a mess of gray to what others might assume is a black and white story. So if the lore is thin, and the story never quite reaches its potential, "Samaritan" has to lean more on its characters and action. One of the great things about having a retired superhero is the story can flash back to a painful past of mistakes and things they wish they'd done differently. If Ben Affleck had been able to make his solo Batman movie in the flavor of Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns," he might have developed a match for "Logan." Schut penned the script, and his other film credits include a 2011 Nicholas Cage film, "Season of the Witch." Nemesis brought a special hammer to the fight that he forged himself and poured all his hatred into.

There are so many holes in Samaritan's screenplay that the movie needs to move faster than it does if it is to outrun them.

It even has a twist that you should be able to predict during the opening credits, and the film doesn’t even do anything useful with that potentially interesting development. His evil is so over-the-top he feels ported over from “ [Robocop 2](/reviews/robocop-2-1990).” The way Sam feels about Samaritan is the way Cyrus feels about Nemesis, so much so that he wants to emulate him and destroy Granite City. Then, of course, there’s the scene in the trailer where Joe gets smashed to bits by a car driven by the folks he just beat up, and his body fixes itself. [Austin Butler](/cast-and-crew/austin-butler)’s Elvis from that [Baz Luhrmann](/cast-and-crew/baz-luhrmann) movie to hop over to Amazon from pay-per-view so he can stroll down the street singing “In the Ghetto.” This place is also crime ridden, with Sam committing petty theft with teenagers who work for the evil Cyrus ( [Pilou Asbæk](/cast-and-crew/pilou-asb%C3%A6k)). The bombastic score by [Kevin Kiner](/cast-and-crew/kevin-kiner) and [Jed Kurzel](/cast-and-crew/jed-kurzel) is just obnoxious and overbearing enough to almost convince you that this overwritten origin story should be taken seriously. Schut](/cast-and-crew/bragi-f-schut)’s screenplay, and to the animators who bring it to life.

This article discusses “Where was Amazon Prime film Samaritan (2022) filmed” and does not contain spoilers.

The Atlanta metro area is the 8th largest in the country and the 10th largest economy. The city of Atlanta has become the Hollywood of the Southeast over the past twenty years. Supposedly in a warehouse fire and at the hands of his nemesis, named Nemesis. The film had numerous production delays in Atlanta due to COVID-19 outbreaks and shutdowns from shooting dates from February 2020 until October of that year. To my relief, with [Overlord](https://readysteadycut.com/2018/11/08/overlord-film-review/) director Julius Avery attached, Samaritan may be one of his best in years. [Rambo: Last Blood ](https://readysteadycut.com/2019/09/21/rambo-last-blood-review/)and the Escape Plan movie has left many wondering where the man behind The Expendables has gone.

Review: Sylvester Stallone finds nuance in superhero deconstruction 'Samaritan'. A bearded man examines a watch up close. Sylvester Stallone in the movie “ ...

[a well-plotted, action-packed throwback to ’80s blockbusters](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2022-05-12/top-gun-maverick-review-tom-cruise) but with better-defined characters, a richer emotional range and some of the best aerial combat sequences ever filmed. (At times the characters are dryly serious; at other times someone will throw in a “Jaws” quote as a wink to the audience.) By the end, “Maneater” has walked right up to the edge of being a fun, silly, “so bad it’s good” time-killer. [Sidney Poitier,](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-01-07/remembering-sidney-poitier) who also cast himself as a Civil War veteran leading wagon trains of freed slaves to a new life out west, alongside his wife (Ruby Dee) and a scheming reverend (Harry Belafonte). [institutional and cultural responses to the storm](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2022-08-11/five-days-at-memorial-review-apple-vera-farmiga-john-ridley), both before and after. The best way to describe the survival thriller “Maneater” is that it’s about two very different people — a grizzled fisherman named Harlan (Trace Adkins) and a vacationer named Jesse (Nicky Whelan) — who have to work together to kill an enormous shark that has eaten some of their loved ones. In between those “you are there” sequences, Russell fills in some of the details of his subject’s life, from his start as a pioneer of antivirus software to his end as a radical libertarian, surrounded by drugs, guns and chaos. It’s hard to separate the facts from the paranoid conspiracy theories when it comes to McAfee, which can make “Running With the Devil” feel a little scattered — like reading a bunch of fevered diary entries. And while McAfee was on the lam — as one of the most famous criminals in the world — multiple reporters started following him, chasing a strange story barreling toward a dark end. [John McAfee](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-06-25/widow-antivirus-pioneer-john-mcafee-was-not-suicidal) was one of those mega-wealthy folks convinced he knew best how the world should work — and that unless the people in charge let him run things, he was under no obligation to follow their rules. The premise of “Samaritan” is the stuff of cartoons, but the actors makes the stakes feel real. [“The Boys”](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-09-03/amazon-the-boys-season-2-karl-urban-billy-butcher) and “Invincible” have stolen some of the movie’s thunder by doing their own deconstructing and reconstructing of caped-crusader mythology. [Sylvester Stallone](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-en-sylvester-stallone-20160211-story.html) plays Joe Smith, a garbageman in Granite City, a blighted, crime-ridden metropolis still reeling from the loss of its champion, Samaritan, in a battle to the death with his villainous brother, Nemesis.

An animated, comic-book-inspired opening turns out to be the best part of "Samaritan," a very by-the-numbers superhero tale that casts Sylvester Stallone as ...

About all that's left is the modest kick of seeing Stallone in this sort of setting, a novelty that only goes so far. ["Overlord"](https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/09/entertainment/overlord-review) ["Creed" films](https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/20/entertainment/creed-ii-review)

Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg are old buds reconnecting in "Me Time," Sylvester Stallone is maybe a former superhero in "Samaritan" and Idris Elba is a Djinn ...

In theaters. Meanwhile the Djinn tells her the long version of his origin story, which can feel as long as the movie's title. "Mad Max" mastermind George Miller tells the story of a genie in a bottle in "Three Thousand Years of Longing," starring Tilda Swinton as a narratologist who frees a Djinn (Idris Elba) but is hesitant to make her three wishes. Granite City needs a superhero, and they get one — maybe — in the form of Joe Smith (Sylvester Stallone), an anonymous looking city dweller whom young Sam (Javon Walton) believes may be Samaritan, former protector of the city streets. "Overlord" director Julius Avery doesn't break the mold here, but he tells a grounded story that forgoes capes, tights and most hallmarks of today's superhero extravaganzas. Kevin Hart is a straight-laced dad and Mark Wahlberg is a loose cannon bachelor in "Me Time," a brutally unfunny buddy comedy, which makes no attempt to ever connect to anything resembling reality.

Stallone cannot redeem 'Samaritan's many flaws, but he can still make it worth watching for those willing to look past a generic superhero story.

In the end, Samaritan’s most irredeemable crime is being bland in a market oversaturated by superhero media. Stallone has a knack for playing big brutes with a heart, the kind of character who knows they can easily win a fight, but still prefers to hold their punches and use their heads. And if the surprise is not mandatory to make a story pleasant, Samaritan fails to explain why the twist happens, undercutting all emotional weight it might have had. There are badly-placed exposition scenes to explain the rules of the fictional Granite City, who the major players in the movie are, and how superpowers work in this universe. Promising yet another gritty and dark take on the genre, Samaritan sadly fails to bring anything new to the table, turning an inventive concept into a generic superhero story. While Marvel still dominates the superhero market, every other studio still tries to get a piece of this very profitable cake by constantly releasing movies and series about superpowered people.

The first reviews for Samaritan are in. What's the verdict? samaritan-poster Prime Video. Action movie and comic book movie fans ...

And IGN’s Siddhant Adlakha is very much the latter, giving Samaritan a 4/10 and saying... [Samaritan is available to stream from August 26, 2022](https://www.amazon.com/Samaritan-Sylvester-Stallone/dp/B0B5M7YXZB), by United Artists Releasing and Amazon Studios via streaming on [Prime Video](https://movieweb.com/tag/amazon-prime/). Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was somewhat less enamored with Samaritan, calling it “basic,” but does praise some of the movie’s elements; “Samaritan” is basic enough that it often seems like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. “Samaritan is a good action movie but a mediocre superhero tale. [Sylvester Stallone](https://movieweb.com/person/sylvester-stallone/) to make his superhero debut in [Samaritan](https://movieweb.com/movie/samaritan/). Samaritan is not grim-dark, nor is it a straight-up kids’ movie; it’s somewhere in between with its unusual perspective and enjoyable.”

Fresh off new sequels saying "Goodbye, but also not goodbye" to Rocky and Rambo, Sylvester Stallone stars in an aging-superhero movie that seems designed to ...

Is Sam genuinely conflicted between taking up a life of crime and doing the right thing, mirroring the way Granite City’s citizens are divided between Samaritan and Nemesis? On top of the narrative confusion, the tenuous, distant spatial relationship between Sam’s original post and the interior of the hideout makes it seem nearly impossible for anyone to hear him whistling a warning, even if he could. The few moments in Samaritan that do recall more recent superhero movies are still a bit offbeat: Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), the younger maniac who wants to claim the mantle of Nemesis for himself, sports both a philosophy and a coat that recall the Dark Knight Rises version of Bane. The movie’s superpower is the ability to inspire a litany of distracting questions in almost any scene, no matter how simple. Granite City owes more to the industrial decay of comics movies like The Crow — though it’s equally indebted to local-news scaremongering that depicts any and all cities as cesspools of crime, on the brink of total anarchy. The premise has an appealing directness, laid out in an illustrated prologue: Granite City was once the home of two brothers with superhuman strength and endurance, dubbed Samaritan and (sigh) Nemesis.