Mammoth Month of Moviepass #6: BAD SAMARITAN

I didn't intent to follow one BIG white male performance with another, but such is the way of things when trying to use Moviepass every day of the week.  In this case, Dean Devlin breaks away from his usual ... I won't say 'shtick' exactly, but his metier of giant, dumb blockbusters for a slick, occasionally tense and still kind of dumb thriller with two performances that carry it aloft.  And while like yesterday's movie one can be carried along by the presence of an actor (here it's David Tenant, who I don't think could give a bad performance if he tried) who fills the frame and even in an unaccented American accent grabs your attention with the skills of his trade, his character and how Devlin portrays him goes the opposite way from You Were Never Really Here.  That movie showed too little of what formed the protagonist in his past, while this shows and explains too much.

But he isn't quite the protagonist here, is he, this "Cale Ehrenreich' or whatever that name that clearly isn't his is?  Robert Sheehan is the one we're following as the Hitchcockian 'everyman', who is struggling as a photographer (despite options to go professional, but hey who wants "boring") and so he goes into a life of "petty" crime - using his job as a valet as a way to rob the houses of those he's meant to park.  It's an ideal and nifty concept for a story in that it could really go anywhere; where Devlin, working off another writer's script, goes to is that at a house young Sean Falco goes to at night includes a room where a woman is tied up to a chair, bound and gagged in leather straps.  While he tries to go back and save her, Cale catches on, and because Cale has all the time and money in the world (stupid trust fund kids) to kidnap and kill and go around and change names and so on anyway, he makes Sean's life a living hell.

Devlin has a decent cat and mouse thriller that he shoots with some competence, but it also looks somewhat cheap.  I was almost surprised to see something of this quality on a screen at a Cineplex; though not without some merit due to Sheehan (who I hadn't seen as a lead before but now I'm a fan, the guy has some good chops and has an empathetic face and character about him) and Tenant (I'm glad Jessica Jones got him to some prominence in the US where Doctor Who didn't quite do it past cult status), I could picture something like this going direct to Redbox, or if there was a "guy" version of Lifetime, if that makes sense.  Cale acts as one of these expert stalkers that operates best in the movies - I should think certain leads or clues would come up in the real world if he was such a thing - but I think the script also lets down the actors too; there are too many times the dialog feels too pat or how characters explain things is too on the nose.

I'm not saying I was expecting Hitchcock exactly either, this is a B movie and it knows it, but I can still be critical even when it's a film I know is only trying for so much.  That may be the core problem, is that it has such a terrific premise and only does alright by it.  That may also be conversely the best one could hope for with Devlin, who (in)famously helped steer the character Godzilla into a massive pile of shit, and who's first feature, Geostorm, played just long enough before it was laughed off the screens and into How Did This Get Made?  At the same time I can see the gears spinning in the basic plot and the final act, when some major characters come together and duke it out and there are more things that are inexplicable (one thing involving a hole in the ground literally full of dead bodies), I enjoyed seeing Tenant digging his teeth into such a lovably despicable yuppie and how some very real mistakes Sheehan's Sean makes early on come back around on him later in the story.

Again, it's nothing great, but it's also not half-bad either.  When it does come around to Rebox, check it out!