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.
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| 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. |
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.
