There’s a clash of mythologies at work in the new Sly Stallone super-hero morass SAMARITAN, and the slight pleasures of watching it come mostly from bearing Rorschach witness to disparate action vigilante traditions as they collide with each other, and fitfully work themselves out.
The setting is Granite City, a Fox News urban hellscape vision of America as crime-infested rathole. Modern action movies have always trafficked in armies of sociopathic urban hoodlums equipped with malice but no backstory–ill-defined villains who mesh well with “good guy with a gun” flyover politics by encouraging smalltown viewers to feel smug about living where very little happens. In Granite City, almost nobody seems to have a job, aside from waiting around to be robbed at knifepoint by cackling human tattoos with knives the length of a baby’s arm. Society has adjusted to living like that–and surely there’s a better way…
Into this tired cliche of a metropolis comes a plotline straight outta Frank Miller’s (overly) influential Batman reboot THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. An embittered and aged superhero named Samaritan has vanished and might be dead. He’s a genetic somesuch with a Cain and Abel background: he killed his evil brother Nemesis and then became the stuff of lore–a ghost. But the urban hellscape Samaritan hides in under the ingenious pseudonym “Joe Lunchbox,” er, I mean, “Smith,” deteriorates completely when crime takes the form of woke bad guy Cyrus (played with unasked for subtlety by not-entirely-accent-suppressing Danish actor Pilou Asbæk). Cyrus is a Nemesis-worshipping, class warfare-spouting mastermind so undefined that he doesn’t really seem to have a job either. When Cyrus goes full Nemesis, A Hero Just Can’t Stand-By and Do Nothing. Dammit.
I’ve seen it all before at least twenty times, so I’ll assume you’ve seen it all before at least once. There’s a saving grace, though, because this is a Stallone movie (a Balboa Production in fact), and for at least thirty years, Stallone’s persona has waffled between two contradictory poles: Rambo, the remorseless killing machine, and Rocky, the goombah underdog with a heart. So what, you might ask, if you combined the two, and created a lovable goombah killing machine with a heart? The universe might explode, or you might get a film like SAMARITAN.
Because this guy doesn’t want to hurt anybody–he’s like Jesus, he set an example once, and now he thinks we have to get along on our own. Oh sure, he fights when he has to, but until the climax he does it tenderly, so that almost nobody dies. He wears a version of Rocky’s knit cap. He waddles around picking garbage like he’s past his prime–doing the Rocky underdog shuffle, from just before Rocky went franchise. Like Chaplin, he even befriends a lonely kid–the put upon, half-orphaned waif who gets bullied, a trope even older than Stallone himself. All their scenes play without irony.
There’s just something touching about watching a guy like Stallone, sagging from some utterly unique combination of old age and disintegrating plastic surgery, as he enacts a kind of silly putty monument to the passage of time and the vitality of movie memory by going through the motions one more time. It’s like finding a melted toy you lost in 1987 among the dust-bunnies under the piano at your mom’s house right after she dies. You don’t know whether to smile or cry, but you definitely feel something.
The politics of SAMARITAN are overt and despicable of course. The bad guy Cyrus spouts watered down Bernie Sanders-isms, and he generates a self-perpetuating anarchist Movement to Overthrow Everything in a single scene, because poor people are so easily led by pretty leftwing lies. It’s all kind of fascist, by design. But while SAMARITAN’s bogus fantasies of an ANTIFA-loving horde were crunching things onscreen, my memories ran to the MAGA-nauts, smashing and crapping their way through the Capitol Building, and raising gibbets where they could hang Mike Pence. Clearly not the message Sly wanted to send.
Let’s be honest here. Movies have been proposing head-busting and gunplay as a solution to life’s problems since at least the Depression Era gangster film, and those simplicities are just as embedded in the diversely cast Marvel Universe as they are in SAMARITAN. The vigilante myth appeals to movie viewers across the spectrum, and wringing your hands about it is pointless. It’s the people who take it seriously in the real world we need to worry about. And that’s on them, not Sly.
It’s interesting that SAMARITAN has emerged just as Stallone has been showing up in the tabloids like he hasn’t since the golden era of his “Married at First Sight” relationship with “Red Sonja” Brigitte Nielsen. Sly’s been lashing out at surviving ROCKY producer Irwin Winkler over intellectual property rights. His twenty-five year marriage to Jennifer Flavin just imploded. There was even a rather bizarre Britney head-shave moment where Sly got the gigantic tattoo of Flavin’s face on what used to be one of his deltoids painted over as a dog while somebody posted it all to social media. I don’t know if a 76 year old man gets to have a mid-life crisis, but if he does, this is what it looks like.
Life, in other words, has gotten really complex for Stallone, like it does for all of us. That’s probably not why we “need” a movie like SAMARITAN. But I’m pretty sure that’s why they exist.