102 min | PG-13 | August 25, 2022 | Amazon Studios
A kid in a decaying city is convinced his silent garbage-man neighbor is the superhero who vanished decades ago. Sylvester Stallone plays the neighbor. The premise writes a check the movie cannot cash.
Sam Cleary is a thirteen-year-old growing up broke in Granite City. He becomes convinced that Joe Smith, the silent garbage man across the hall, is Samaritan, the hero the city believes died in a fire long ago. The film wants to be a grounded urban fairy tale about a boy hunting for a father in a place that offers him none. Underneath the cape lore it is a story about poverty and the men who profit from it. That premise has bones. The movie keeps reaching for a comic-book ending it has not earned.
Javon Walton plays Sam with restless energy and a permanent chip on his shoulder, and he carries long stretches of the film alone. Stallone plays Joe Smith as a man hiding inside his own body. He underplays everything, mumbling and slope-shouldered, and the stillness reads truer than the fights that arrive later. Pilou Asbæk plays the villain Cyrus with a glee the script never roots in anything real. Dascha Polanco plays Sam’s mother Tiffany as a woman drowning in shifts and rent, and Moisés Arias plays Reza, the small-time fixer who pulls Sam toward the wrong crowd.
Julius Avery directs Granite City as a perpetual dusk of sodium light and wet asphalt. The production design builds a place stuck between decades, full of CRT televisions and analog tools, where the superhero past feels like a rumor. Bragi F. Schut’s script telegraphs its big reveal in the first act and then stages it as a surprise. The action stays small and physical until the finale, when the digital effects inflate and the grounded texture evaporates. The hand-to-hand fights have weight. The fireball climax does not.
Samaritan understands that its real subject is class, not capes. The most honest scenes put Sam in front of a choice between an honest dollar and a stolen one. Every time the film leans into that tension, it works. Every time it remembers it owes you a superhero, it stalls. There is a sharp little movie about a poor kid and a broken man buried inside this one. The genre machinery keeps burying it again.