Bad Samaritan

A well-directed thriller with knuckle-chewing suspense. A cast of unknowns give some first-rate performances, doing everything right to milk the throb of panic and anxiety from “what would I do?” situations. Terror builds from start to finish.

The filmmaking itself is suspenseful, classic horror filmmaking, with plenty of jump scares and ominous camera movements. But where the film succeeds most is in its realistic use of technology.

Dean Devlin finally steps out from Roland Emmerich’s shadow with a tight, twisty little thriller. Add a fourth star to the rating if David Tennant going full Nicolas Cage sounds like your kind of thing.

Bad Samaritan plays like an unambitious episode of “Black Mirror,” low on techno-savvy but enhanced by the always-compelling David Tennant and Robert Sheehan, an Irish actor best known for his role on the British series “Misfits.”

Great villains make good thrillers, Hitchcock said. But he had the good sense to cast empathetic and talented movie stars as his heroes and heroines, too.

The Bad Samaritan director, Dean Devlin, handles the proceedings like Adrian Lyne (who directed “Fatal Attraction”) on HGH supplements (and divested of over a third of Mr. Lyne’s visual elegance, such as it is).

Given the nasty taste in the mouth that the film leaves, it seems almost besides the point to worry about plot holes.

I literally just setup a new account to write this review so that I could 1) completely agree with the User's rating on this one. This was very much a well executed suspenseful film, where the writing, acting, and timing were all worth checking out on the big screen. 2) Critics really do show their true colors here - and not in a good way. It's not shocking to see their low ratings for a lower-than-Marvel-budget film, especially when there are numerous stories of critics incentivized to submit a particular score based on criteria that couldn't be further away from what the common movie watcher cares about. Suggestion: There should be something to establish Critic credibility and hold the bias Critics accountable. I hope someone could allow Users to rate the movie critics that end up giving scores so polarizing to the average User score.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Pretty believable deranged psycho, reasonably well played burglar. Sort of interesting, sometimes the suspense is really there, though it's all hardly surprising or innovative. If you look closely at the plot it's all rather improbable, but if you go with the flow it's an okay movie.

Tennant carries this movie far beyond what a majority of other lead actors could. The rest of the cast tries but they just can't carry this laughably bad script beyond its laughably bad status. This movie isn't even worthy of a rental IMO. The pacing is so inconsistent, It is way too long (nearly 2 hours) and the ending is just so freaking cliched. And I just love how Tennant's character outsmarts the protagonist at each and every turn yet is defeated at the very end.

The movie gets worse the longer you watch it. Kinda sad, because it looks like a good amount of effort was put in as far as acting goes. It's just really boring and pointless. No suspense, thrills, horror, action or purpose. I should have just went with my gut and saw avengers again.