Bad Samaritan Movie Review

Bad Samaritan (2018)

Watch the trailer
Written by: Brandon Boyce (screenplay)
Directed by: Dean Devlin
Starring: David Tennant, Kerry Condon, Robert Sheehan
Rated: R

Plot
A pair of burglars stumble upon a woman being held captive in a home they intended to rob.

Verdict
This movie is here to entertain, not make sense. Quick pacing keeps it interesting, but it frequently skirts realism for cool scenes and reveals. While David Tennant excels at playing a villain, the character falls flat with a lack of back story or substantiated reason to be committing his various crimes. The plot is a great idea and moderately effective, it's just not developed past a very basic level.
Skip it.

Review
The setup is questionable, but the plot is great. Two valet drivers, Sean and Derek, use the GPS of customers' expensive cars to find their homes and rob them while on duty. Of course this string of robberies is short sighted. They'd have to know they'd be caught rather quickly. It's even pointed out in the movie the cops are tracking the robberies.
When a new Maserati owned by Cale Erendreich pulls up, they think they've hit the mother load, that is until Sean discovers a woman chained up in the man's house.

The very first images are quick flashes of a boy and a horse, and we hear the crack of a whip. With a keen eye you'll see a whip framed on the wall in Cale's house. The first scene is supposed to be tantalizing but comes across as forced. Especially so, since the reveal of what that scene is falls flat.

I like this setup. If the robbers report the crime they found, they also have to report themselves. I get self preservation and that makes for a nice bit of tension on it's own. The movie doesn't push the moral question to viewers as strong as it should. It needed to force viewers to think about their answer, to get us involved. Mutual assured destruction sets up a sadistic game between Cale, Derek, and Sean.

This falls to the rule of cool a few too many times. It's one of those movies that you shouldn't think too hard on the details as it comes up lacking. A few times you question how could that be done so quickly, would that really happen like that, and how did we get from there to here. If you ignore those questions, it's a fun ride but it also makes the movie shallow.

There's a scene towards the beginning with Sean's girlfriend that felt out of place, it comes back later in the plot but it's completely forced. She's there just to show how far Cale would go and to make Sean seem better than he is. She could have been leveraged to explore Sean's guilt. He found a woman bound and left her, though he does go back.

Tennant plays a great villain, he's unnerving. He wants to ruin the burglars' lives and hopes to cover his own tracks in the process. The plan seems like a reach, but he's made it this far as a serial killer. What follows is a back and forth. Sean can't get anybody to believe him as he goes to increasingly desperate measures to help the bound woman he saw. Cale Erendreich  begins systematically ruining Sean's life and everyone Sean knows. It's a good warning about not keeping a list of passwords on your computer and leaving your computer unlocked.

Tennant also played a villain in the Netflix series Marvel's Jessica Jones. In both roles he does great, but in Jessica Jones he was grounded, more believable. He was a villain because the story built him as one. With Bad Samaritan he's a villain that acts in service to keep the plot moving.
His back story never falls into place. That's particularly onerous when the FBI states as a child he broke horses, now as an adult he breaks people. They have little basis for that huge leap in logic. As a viewer I knew what Cale was doing to his victims, but the FBI doesn't. If they did know more, they should be farther along on that case. Even I don't know why Cale the trust fund killer made that leap. There is no foundation for it, but this movie is here to entertain, not make logical sense. Even a little bit of depth for the characters could make this better. They are just pawns of the plot in a succession of cheap thrills.