A brand new superhero movie starring Sylvester Stallone sounds like the ideal way to spend a Friday, which is exactly what a huge number of fans have been doing now that Samaritan is finally available to stream on Prime Video.
It’s been a long time coming for the street-level story, which was originally scheduled for a theatrical release in November 2020 before the pandemic and Amazon’s acquisition of MGM got in the way. Unfortunately, critics haven’t been too kind to the movie, which currently holds a weak 36 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
However, proving once again that the divide between reviewers and rabid audiences is starker than ever, Overlord director Julius Avery’s latest feature holds a much higher user rating of 84 percent. Not only that, but having checked Samaritan out for themselves, viewers fail to understand why the hard-boiled superhero flick is getting such a bad rap.
Stallone largely emerges unscathed from Samaritan, which is understandable when the entire story is carried on the back of his grizzled retired crimefighter, but things do get crushingly generic and uninspired at regular intervals. As we mentioned in our own review, the concept has limitless potential with which to craft a different kind of crimefighting tale the likes of which we’ve rarely seen explored, but the end product instead opts to repeatedly play things as safe as possible.
That being said, as much as we’re not expecting Samaritan to launch a franchise, MGM and Amazon may explore the notion of future installments should it translate its popularity among subscribers into cold, hard data.
