From Rocky to Rambo and now a superhero, I guess Sylvester Stallone has really done it all. But maybe we could have done without the last thing he’s done. Sylvester Stallone made a superhero film called Samaritan, which premieres on Amazon Prime. While he was in Guardians of the Galaxy 2, he wasn’t necessarily a superhero in the film, so this is his first foray into the superhero universe. I like the idea of Sly being a superhero, but unfortunately, it wasn’t well executed. Sure, the premise is an interesting idea about brothers who are superheroes, one evil and one good, battling it out until the last one standing goes into hiding. For 25 years the people of the city within the movie wondered if Samaritan whatever come back until a young kid being bullied thinks he’s discovered the long-lost superhero. That’s where our story takes off.

Admittedly, I was interested in Sylvester Stallone being a superhero. Why not, he’s great as Rocky, fantastic as Rambo, and the Expendable movies where he’s essentially every action star, he’s ever been wrapped up in one character are a lot of fun. So, it stands to reason that he could be a superhero. But even if you have a good story, you have to make it interesting and unfortunately for Sylvester Stallone, it feels like he just phoned it. The premise of this movie would have been better for an aging Rocky who disappeared and then discovers another young boxer. Could also probably work for a Rambo movie. Then again, that is essentially the plot of Rambo 4 where he was hiding out in Thailand until he was called upon to rescue some Americans. That was a much better story!  

We know that Sylvester Stallone is an action star so you’re not going to have a lot of witty dialogue. It’s not like he hasn’t been able to pull that off because as the straight-laced, Wall Street type Cop in Tango and Cash, he was great. But in Samaritan, he mostly pushes people around and protects a little kid with very little dialogue. As I said, it seems as if he phoned it in because he wanted to do a superhero movie. I’m not saying that the movie is a complete disaster, it’s worth watching at least once for the interesting twist at the end. But this definitely isn’t Sylvester Stallone’s best movie, and we really didn’t need him in the superhero genre.

What does make the movie worth watching is the fact that you do get a lot of good action and the fire scenes are pretty intense, very reminiscent of Backdraft. The rest of the cast is pretty good and they’re the ones that make this movie worth watching.  Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton, Dascha Polanco; Moises Arias are great.  And Pilou Asbæk is fantastic as the villain. Of course, he would be because he was great in Game of Thrones.   As I mentioned before, there is an interesting twist at the end, but the 90-minute, build-up almost isn’t worth it just to get to a few good scenes at the end.  Samaritan is a good one-timer. I definitely wouldn’t have paid money to see it in the theater, but it’s good for streaming services. You can entertain yourself for 90 minutes on a Sunday afternoon and not entirely be disappointed, but it’s not the kind of superhero movie that you will revisit.

Not every superhero movie can be great. There are plenty of Marvel movies leading up to the infinity Wars that are not that good, but they were made to tell a superhero’s origin story. If this were a trilogy of films, this would be an okay starting point because you really don’t know a whole lot about Samaritan except for the fact that two brothers fought in a great battle and one disappeared. There’s not much of a superhero origin story and you really do need that to make us connect to the character. There isn’t anything that makes us connect to Samaritan. At the end of the day, this doesn’t feel so much of a superhero movie as watching an aging Rocky or Rambo take a young kid under his wing. In fact, it would have been a much better movie if we had seen either one of those characters within the same storyline. Perhaps Sylvester Stallone just doesn’t make a good superhero and that’s okay. Sometimes you can just be a good action star and that’s all you need to be in Hollywood.