Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Bad Samaritan Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman September 6, 2018

Movie fans will recognize Dean Devlin's name as a prominent producer of various films, notably large-scale Sci-Fi and Disaster films and most notably when paired with Roland Emmerich, the director with whom he so frequently collaborated on pictures such as Independence Day, Stargate, and The Patriot. But it's only recently that he's stepped into the director shoes himself, helming the disaster of a Disaster film Geostorm and following it up with the much more well-rounded Bad Samaritan, a picture about a nobody of a young man engaged in a battle of wits and wills with a wealthy sadist. It's a fairly straightforward genre picture, lacking real grit or a menacing edge, but it's a perfectly watchable little venture that proves Devlin may have some directing chops after all following the fumble of a film in Geostorm.

Sean (Robert Sheehan) is an amateur photographer of considerable talent living in Portland, Oregon. He works as a valet at night and, with his friend Derek (Carlito Olivero), regularly steals from the people whose cars they park. They take things of modest value, hoping not to get caught simply by hoping the victims never really notice that they’ve been robbed. One evening, after a failed score, a rude businessman named Cale Erendreich (David Tennant), driving a Maserati, pulls up and Sean takes the opportunity to break into his house while he’s dining inside. He lives only minutes away and it should be an easy score. Inside, after locating a gold mine -- an inactivated credit card -- he finds a girl, bloodied and bruised, securely tied to a chair. Sean flees before he can free her but leaves behind a few traces of evidence that he was in the house. He calls the police, but their brief, routine investigation leads nowhere. He continues to harass authorities but encounters resistance at every turn. Meanwhile, Erendreich sets out to ruin Sean and destroy the lives of everyone he holds dear.

The central idea -- a couple of small-time crooks robbing people while they have access to their cars, their keys, address via GPS, and the promise of an empty home -- isn’t a bad one. And neither is the idea that one of them finds something horrible, life-changing, and likely deadly inside. The film takes the idea and plays it rather straight, but with enough movement, psychological intensity and paranoia, and a belief that the antagonist, who always seems to be several steps ahead, will get away with his crimes after all. Wealth and social status are his protections from more than cursory suspicion. He’s smart and technologically savvy and uses digital means of tracking Sean and ruining his life, but he's also not above brutally beating and murdering those closest to his nemesis. He’s also relentless, which is really the only quality Sean can bring to their battle of wills. Nobody believes Sean, but persistence may ultimately pay off, if he can stay alive long enough, if his world can hold on long enough, for him to finally find a receptive ear.

The movie does have more than a few moments when the glue seems to be peeling away, leaving the movie overexposed and overlong, particularly in the middle stretch as Sean pleads his case to the authorities and Erendreich works to cover his tracks and ruin Sean’s life. But Devlin does well to build energy back up just when it seems to be dwindling. For the most part, Bad Samaritan is fairly brisk, usually tight, and decently engaging. Performances are not necessarily a strong point -- the characters as-scripted lack any real ingenuity and Erendreich’s backstory yields most of the film’s choppiest breakaway moments -- but they’re not a total hindrance or movie killer, either. Both Sheehan and Tennant are limited more by the script than their own abilities. Both struggle to find any novelty or sense of real individual drive or purpose beyond the story’s constraints, though Tennant is more than adequately menacing as the sadist who will likely beat Sean, if he can keep his cool and stay one step ahead of his relentlessly persistent young and poor adversary who Erendreich sees more as an annoyance than a worthy opponent, at least at first when he maintains the upper hand with every move Sean makes.

Bad Samaritan Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The digitally photographed Bad Samaritan delivers a quality 1080p viewing experience, hitting all of the expected high points of a top-end transfer. The image presents appreciably clear and complex details throughout the film. Whether considering essentials like skin and clothes, dense city exteriors and more messy locales like Sean's loft, or some cleaner but no less enjoyably complex locales such as Erendreich's home, Sony's transfer never fails to capture each object with about as much detail as the format can muster. Colors are neutral, favoring neither an unnatural intensity or a faded dullness. Black levels are of a quality depth and shadow details in some of the lower light interiors and nighttime exteriors fare very well. Skin tones appear true to life. Noise is minimal and other source or encode flaws like banding or aliasing are essentially absent in any quantity worth mentioning. This is a very handsome presentation from Sony.

Bad Samaritan Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Bad Samaritan features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack. The film's opening act features a variety of various city ambient effects, such as passing traffic or light footfalls and pedestrian chatter, in those scenes in which Sean and Derek work the valet parking gig. Additionally, little examples of din filter through in other locales, most notably in the police station near the one-hour mark and in FBI field offices at other points in the film. There's a positive, throaty engine rev every time Erendreich's Maserati cruises around town, even at relatively low speed. Music is appropriately deep and dense with quality low end support and wide, enjoyable clarity. A few more potent sound effects bear the fruits of a nicely engineered and delivered track, presenting with the appropriate level of intensity and stage placement and pronouncement. Dialogue is clear and delivery is consistent in the front-center portion of the stage.

Bad Samaritan Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Bad Samaritan contains a commentary and deleted scenes. This release does not ship with DVD or digital copies. It also does not appear to ship with a slipcover.

• Audio Commentary: Director Dean Devlin and Writer Brandon Boyce discuss the film.
• Deleted Scenes (1080p, 8:59 total runtime): Included are Insufficient Funds, Let Us Do Our Job, Look After Yourself, The Next Step, Eyes on you, Beaverton, and The Ending.

Bad Samaritan Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bad Samaritan isn't a bad movie. Devlin leaves behind the big-budget and spectacle of Geostorm -- curiously a movie that should have been in his wheelhouse given his proximity to and involvement in all of those grand-scale epics that he produced for Roland Emmerich -- and embraces a more personal, intimate battle-of-wills Thriller between a wealthy sadist and a poor college student struggling to get by and willing to sacrifice everything to save a girl he's never met. The movie occasionally struggles with length and pace, but even if it's not destined for greatness it's certainly a watchable little film that portends a better career for Devlin as a director than did Geostorm. Sony's Blu-ray delivers, as always for the studio's releases, high end video and solid lossless audio. A commentary and a handful of deleted scenes are also included. Worth a look.