- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
25The Samaritan treads a fine line between film-noir moodiness and crime-thriller triteness, mostly settling for the latter.
-
40His (Jackson) doleful revenant is in almost every scene, and this hardworking actor seems to know that the film around him should be a light-footed caper instead of a grim noir with a side order of deviance.
-
12A would-be piece of pulp fiction about a parolee trying to go straight, The Samaritan proves that even Samuel L. Jackson can be boring.
-
50About a third of the way along, there's a shocking revelation that definitely packs a punch. Problem is, it's followed by a near-immediate return to familiar narrative convention, where the noir ante rises exponentially toward a climax that arrives too hastily and ends too neatly.
-
May 17, 201250The Samaritan doesn't wind up feeling like a con, exactly, but it has just enough promise to leave viewers feeling ripped off when it comes up short.
-
20The most charitable approach to this unfortunate diversion in Jackson's career would be to pretend it never happened. Now, who wants to go see "The Avengers" again?
-
May 17, 201255Svelte enough in its reassembling of familiar elements to be, for a while, as comfortably pleasant as sipping on what once used to be your go-to drink - until The Samaritan takes a jarring turn right out of Park Chan-wook, and from there takes a tumble into ludicrousness from which it doesn't recover.
-
May 17, 201250An odd stylistic mash-up, the movie never quite coheres, in part because the characters are so thin that the style doesn't have much to cohere to.
-
42It's difficult to describe The Samaritan, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays an ex-con trying to return to the straight and narrow after 25 years inside, without overlapping a dozen other movies in his nigh-endless filmography, nor watch any scene without thinking of how many times he's drawn from the same bag of tricks.
-
75The Samaritan isn't a great noir, but it's true to the tradition and gives Samuel L. Jackson one of his best recent roles.
-
30Weaver's story slowly begins to buckle under the weight of its own self-seriousness and familiarity, concluding with a showdown and resolution marked by one implausible and unsatisfying been-here-done-that twist after another.
-
20No one expects a Samuel L. Jackson thriller to be Shakespeare, but David Weaver's wanna-be '70s-grindhouse cheapie doesn't even achieve serviceability.
-
70A gritty serving of pulp fiction masterfully perpetrated by Samuel L. Jackson as a philosophical ex-con trying to buck the considerable odds by taking a shot at redemption.
-
40A clotted, knotted, twisty noir that is, unfortunately, short on the required atmosphere.
-
50If anything, this Canadian production misses a great opportunity to dig into its setting and examine the dark side of seemingly pristine Toronto, even as the script by Elan Mastai and director David Weaver labors over a mostly boilerplate storyline.