Samaritan: Not worth saving

Samaritan (2022) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for strong violence and profanity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Well … at least this Sylvester Stallone project is age-appropriate.

 

Director Julius Avery’s fitfully entertaining urban drama is an inner-city spin on the superhero genre, although Bragi F. Schut’s script is far better suited to the graphic novel format that preceded this film by almost a decade. 

 

To the exasperated frustration of Joe (Sylvester Stallone, right), young Sam
(Javon "Wanna" Walton, left) is convinced that his grizzled neighbor actually is a
former superhero, now living incognito.

Either way, Schut’s premise is mildly novel, although the execution leaves much to be desired; viewers will depart this film vexed by a glaring hanging chad.

At its core, this story echoes the famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

 

As explained in a comic book-style flashback that introduces this film, Granite City once hosted a pair of supers: the virtuous Samaritan and his equally powered villainous rival, Nemesis. Their ongoing skirmishes climaxed in an epic battle 25 years ago, which claimed both their lives.

 

Since then, much of Granite City has become a crime-infested slum burdened by the disenfranchised and helpless homeless, overrun with greed and corruption, and ruled by roving gangs of criminal thugs.

 

Cinematographer David Ungaro and production designers Greg Berry and Christopher Glass certainly make everything look gritty and grimy.

 

Thirteen-year-old Sam Cleary (Javon “Wanna” Walton), thoroughly absorbed by the legend of Samaritan, has clung to the notion that — somehow — his hero actually survived that clash. This obsession has prompted him to mistakenly assume “superhuman qualities” in a long list of ordinary citizens, much to the annoyance of bookstore owner/journalist Albert Casler (Martin Starr), who has long investigated what actually is known about their city’s former supers.

 

Sam’s fixation also is a burden on his mother, Tiffany (Dascha Polanco), a single parent just barely making ends meet. Indeed, she often doesn’t make them meet, which prompts Sam — against his better judgment — to accept some easy money from local gang lord Cyrus (the hissably evil Pilou Asbæk, well remembered as the similarly vile Euron Greyjoy, in Game of Thrones).

 

Asbæk is totally terrifying, particularly when — with eyes widened and bulging to an almost impossible degree — he leans into somebody else’s face, either with quiet menace or enraged explosions of temper.

 

Sam also has been paying attention to Joe (Stallone), a reclusive garbage collector who repairs broken appliances in an apartment across the street from the boy’s bedroom window. Sam’s curiosity is further piqued when Joe rescues the boy from a beating by a trio of teenage thugs led by Reza (Moises Arias, memorably nasty); the older man handles the punks with eyebrow-lifting ease.

 

Joe rebuffs the boy’s excited curiosity for a time, but a subsequent incident removes all doubt; the older man definitely is an enhanced being.

 

The King of Staten Island: Should be de-throned

The King of Staten Island (2020) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for drug use, sexual candor, brief violence and gore, and relentless profanity and vulgarity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.12.20

I cannot imagine this film’s target audience.

For starters, calling it a comedy is false advertising; nothing is funny here. Not even remotely amusing.

Scott (Pete Davidson) sees nothing wrong with staying home with his mother (Marisa
Tomei) most nights, and watching mindless television. Alas, when this cozy dynamic is
threatened by a newcomer, Scott becomes even meaner than usual.

If writer/director Judd Apatow has made this for millennials, it’s a savagely damning portrait. Are we seriously to believe that anything about this misbegotten drama’s protagonist is endearing?

Even given Apatow’s decency-shredding tendencies, and fondness for vulgarity, The King of Staten Island is way, way beyond tolerable. 

It’s available as an on-demand streaming rental, at a premium price.

At its core, the script — by Apatow, Dave Sirus and star Pete Davidson — is a redemption saga. Meaning, we spend the first two acts watching ruthlessly selfish, 24-year-old, weed-smoking degenerate Scott Carlin (Davidson) abuse everybody in his orbit … after which we’re supposed to cheer him on during the third act, when he starts getting his act together.

Sorry, but no; this formula works only if the character in question deserves redemption. Which Scott most certainly does not.

On top of which, the character dynamics here don’t exist in anything remotely approaching reality. While higher than a kite, and egged on by his “friends,” Scott starts to tattoo a 9-year-old boy … and he doesn’t get locked up for child abuse? Worse still, the boy’s father — following an initial furious tirade — quickly turns forgiving, because he wants to start dating Scott’s mother?!?

This is supposed to seem reasonable?

Not in this universe. This script — and premise — are forced contrivances stretched far beyond the snapping point.

Scott, a foul-mouthed Failure To Launch, still lives with his mother, Margie (Marisa Tomei, who does her best to bring some class and charm to these dire proceedings). Their lives have remained on hold ever since her husband, Scott’s father, died in action as a Staten Island fireman. Margie maintains a living room shrine to her late husband; Scott has weaponized his grief as an excuse to be nasty to everybody.

Five Feet Apart: Brings hearts together

Five Feet Apart (2019) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang

Mother Nature must’ve been really cranky when she came up with cystic fibrosis.

The genetic disorder is ghastly enough on its own, but insult to injury comes from the fact that two such victims must be very, very careful to avoid proximity to each other: a detail that apparently inspired Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis to concoct a premise laden with irony and Shakespearean-level tragedy.

Unable to enjoy anything close to a proper date, Stella (Haley Lu Richardson) and
Will (Cole Sprouse) make the most of various hospital locales.

What if two CF sufferers fell in love?

The result, Five Feet Apart, is a sweet little melodrama orchestrated with considerable care by director Justin Baldoni.

That seems a contradiction in terms, for a late entry in the “dying teenager” cycle that erupted after 2014’s adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. And, indeed, this film follows some of that mini-genre’s clichés: resolute young protagonist determined to beat the odds; engaging sidebar characters; little victories snatched from the jaws of frustrating setbacks. And vice-versa.

Some of the plot points are predictable; there’s simply no getting around it. Such stories come with limitations and built-in expectations.

But there’s also no getting around the fact that Haley Lu Richardson is quite charming in the lead role, and she’s well supported by Cole Sprouse and their co-stars. More crucially, Daughtry and Iaconis tell an engaging story while also supplying a gentle primer on the ins and outs of CF. This film doesn’t shy from grim details, but Baldoni avoids unnecessarily graphic or invasive sequences. We get it.

Indeed, everything comes together quite well … until a third-act hiccup that almost destroys the good will that Baldoni, Daughtry and Iaconis have built to that point: a sequence that abruptly stops feeling genuine, and becomes contrived Hollywood stupidity. Rips us right out of the movie.

The error was obvious to everybody at Tuesday evening’s preview screening, when the theater suddenly erupted with disappointed variations of “Oh, come on.”

So let’s set that aside, for the moment.

Plucky, 17-year-old Stella Grant (Richardson) has battled CF her entire life, meeting the enemy with a blend of high spirits, dogged research and the cheerful acceptance of limitations and frequent medical intervention. She has loyal gal pals who keep up with her candid vlog; she knows the nearby hospital staff on a first-name basis, thanks to treatment regimens that can last days or weeks. She manages the overwhelming quantity of meds with a scientist’s meticulous precision.

Ender's Game: Well played

Ender's Game (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.1.13

Celebrated sci-fi author Orson Scott Card was 26 when his first work, a novella titled “Ender’s Game,” was published in the August 1977 issue of Analog. In 1985, with much more ambitious plans for that tale’s young protagonist — and with the security of a rapidly blossoming literary career — Card expanded his debut effort into a novel that won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

While Petra (Hailee Steinfeld) watches warily, the thuggish Bonzo (Moises Arias) angrily
warns Ender (Asa Butterfield) to stay out of his way. But Ender isn't one to remain on
the sidelines, which Petra senses immediately; things are destined to get quite ugly
between these two boys.

Today, the so-called “Ender series” encompasses — are you sitting down? — a dozen novels, a dozen short stories and roughly four dozen comic books (some adapting existing novels, some with entirely new material).

Obviously, fans can’t get enough.

More significantly, for our purposes, those same fans — and the general public — will thoroughly enjoy director/scripter Gavin Hood’s big-screen adaptation of the novel that started it all.

The South African-born filmmaker is an impressively shrewd choice for this material, having burst onto the scene with 2005’s Tsotsi, which traces a week in the life of a young Johannesburg street thug who wrestles with his conscience after finding a baby in the back seat of a car he steals. The grim drama won that year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and Hood — a USC film school grad — went on to an eclectic career as a director, writer and actor.

Ender’s Game also focuses strongly on the warring conscience of a boy, while contemplating several big-ticket philosophical issues that include state-sanctioned child abuse, planetary resource depletion and the novel’s most controversial theme: the notion of meeting a bully’s brutality with a savage response designed to prevent ALL subsequent attacks.

The setting is a futuristic Earth, decades after our planet just barely repelled an invasion by an insectoid alien race dubbed the “Formics.” Expecting that these swarming monstrosities have returned to their home world in order to mount an even larger assault fleet, Earth’s united military force has pinned its hopes on a multi-national “Battle School” designed to train our best and brightest military tacticians:

Carefully selected children.

Young minds are much more agile and adaptable; we know this in our own real world. It therefore stands to reason that young minds weaned on a diet of strategy-laced computer games might be nurtured into becoming the next Patton, Napoleon or Hannibal.

(Needless to say, this rather disturbing notion — and the possibility that modern nations might be acting on it — is a helluva lot more timely today, than it was back in 1977. Among his many other talents, Card deserves credit for scary prescience.)

The Kings of Summer: This film rules!

The Kings of Summer (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: R, and rather harshly, for occasional profanity and teen drinking
By Derrick Bang

This is why I love my job.

The Kings of Summer marks an impressive feature debut for director Joran Vogt-Roberts and writer Chris Galletta, the latter with nothing more to his credit than a brief 2005 stint as a production staff member for The Late Show with David Letterman. Vogt-Roberts’ résumé includes several shorts and a lot of TV series work, the latter suggesting the hilariously snarky mind set on ample display in this film.

Having more or less completed their new home away from home, our three young
renegades — from left, Joe (Nick Robinson), Patrick (Gabriel Basso) and Biaggio (Moises
Arias) — contemplate the next challenge: putting food on the table. That'll prove far
more difficult than anticipated, since they've no experience with traps, lures, bare-handed
fishing or any other woodsian skills.

Actually, calling this picture “impressive” isn’t nearly strong enough. It’s a sure-fire audience pleaser: one of those so-called “little films” — like Little Miss Sunshine or Juno — guaranteed to take off like a rocket, once word gets out. This year’s enthusiastic Sundance Festival audience certainly thought so, granting a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize (not won, alas).

As a collaborative team, Vogt-Roberts and Galletta demonstrate a striking degree of creative synch; the latter’s dialogue sounds just right coming from the naturalistic ensemble cast, granting a level of verisimilitude that makes these characters feel like the folks next door.

Allowing, that is, for a left-of-center gaggle of eccentrics commonly found in films by Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers. But I mean that in the gentlest way: However funny the lines, however warped some of the emotional behavior by sidebar adults, this is — first and foremost — an intimate coming-of-age saga.

In the truest sense of the old cliché, we laugh with our young protagonists, not at them.

The contemporary setting is a smallish town in Northeast Ohio, the sort of all-American community that typifies such narratives. Best friends Joe (Nick Robinson) and Patrick (Gabriel Basso) are strongly bonded, in part, by their inability to cope with utterly impossible parents.

Joe’s father, Frank (Nick Offerman), hasn’t yet recovered from his wife’s untimely death, years earlier. He has become bitter, condescending and imperious: a combination that doesn’t blend well with a teenage son’s instinctive rebelliousness. Joe’s favorite method of revenge, when sufficiently annoyed, is to summon the local law — personified by the competent Capt. Davis (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and her absolutely useless rookie companion (Thomas Middleditch) — on some trumped-up accusation.

Frank responds to such hijinks the way he deals with everybody: angry sarcasm delivered by Offerman with a relentlessly straight face ... which, of course, makes every bile-fueled line that much funnier. (And they’re pretty funny to begin with.)

Joe’s older sister, Heather (Alison Brie), fled the tension-laced home awhile back, although she still visits. That speaks well of the young woman; her choice of male companions, however, does not. Colin (Eugene Cordero) is a misfit who’s as oblivious to social cues, as he is to the fact that Frank constantly winds him up.

In this case, we can hardly blame Frank; Colin’s much too easy a target. Which Heather is aware of, and Brie’s face is an amusing study in conflict: clearly annoyed by her loutish father, but equally embarrassed by her clueless boyfriend.