David Tennant gives us a fine villainous performance in this new crime thriller directed by Dean Devlin. It's getting a UK cinema release from Signature Entertainment, with its premiere at London Frightfest later this week.
Sean Falco (Robert Sheehan) runs a restaurant valet service in Portland Oregon with his chum Derek (Carlito Olivero) but the moment the car keys are in their hands, off they go to their customer's residence to indulge in a bit of petty larceny.
Things take a turn for the harrowing when Sean ends up with the car of Cale Erendreich (David Tennant) who has a lovely big house, posh furniture, and a lady chained up in his office. Sean tries to free her but unfortunately for him Cale finishes his dinner early and wants his car back. Sean contacts the police but when they go to Cale's house the girl has vanished.
Cale, however, is one of those completely bonkers villains and once he has locked his victim up in another cage in the country, he decides to make life a living hell for Sean. Can Sean free the girl, prove to the police that he isn't just a petty thief, and put an end to bad old Cale's girl-torturing, killing and burying ways?
The last thing Dean Devlin directed was 2017's GEOSTORM, which many hoped would be the last thing he would direct, ever. However, in a change of tack from making ludicrous disaster movies (he also produced INDEPENDENCE DAY and the 1998 GODZILLA remake nobody likes to talk about), here he is having a go at the Hitchcockian thriller.
We have a hero no-one believes, a villain everyone believes, and race against time to save both someone's life and the day in general. The big problem is that our hero character is a bloke who breaks into people's houses and steals stuff. It takes considerable skill to get your audience on the side of a character like that and BAD SAMARITAN doesn't quite possess it.
Likewise the raison d'etre for Tennant's character acting the way he does is a bit daft. Like giallo denouement daft. Now, regular readers of this site will know I love a bit of daftness but again, BAD SAMARITAN doesn't quite have the courage to pull off its central concept with any style.
All of which made me grateful for David Tennant. Like Vincent Price or Patrick Stewart, he is capable of making the otherwise mediocre watchable and he does so here, offering us a seething manic loony of a villainous performance that's worth the price of admission. If you need a reason to see BAD SAMARITAN he is definitely it.
BAD SAMARITAN is getting its UK cinema premiere at London Frightfest on Thursday 23rd August 2018 with selected countrywide distribution after that.
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