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Are Sam’s suspicions about his neighbour correct?

Having previously starred back in the 1990s in futuristic dystopian action movies such as Demolition Man and Judge Dredd, this near-future superhero take isn’t that much of a departure for Sylvester Stallone, and in fact in many ways feels very much like that sort of era of movie.

It has a decent pedigree too, directed by Australian Julius Avery, who made the sublime Overlord in 2018, and sharing several members of that film’s cast, most notably Sophia Tatum, who was a Resistance member in that film, and gangster moll here. There’s also a fun musical score from the combined talents of Jed Kurzel (Alien Covenant) and Kevin Kiner (Clone Wars, Rebels).

The basic premise is fairly simple: superhero Samaritan had been declared dead in a battle with his supervillain brother, Nemesis. Thirteen year-old Sam (Javon Walton) comes to believe that neighbouring trashman Joe (Stallone) is in fact Samaritan, having survived the battle. While he spies on Joe, Sam is also targeted by bullies who are low-level members of a gang run by Cyrus (Pilou Ashbaek, who was Euron Greyjoy in Game Of Thrones) who is obsessed with Nemesis and raids a police storage facility to steal the supervillain’s signature weapon, a hammer “forged with his rage and hatred.” Before long, Cyrus is sparking riots to carry out what he believes Nemesis’s plan to have been, Sam is being advised by Joe, and Joe is revealed to indeed have superpowers such as Wolverine-style healing and super-strength. So far, so good.

In fact there’s plenty of good here. The Umbrella Academy’s Javon Walton is an engaging audience identification figure, gutsy and sympathetic as well as believable. Ashbaek makes a fun comic book/videogame style villain – Cyrus here would fit right in to the Far Cry game series as an antagonist – and gets to have plenty of fun. It is, mind you, a shame that they chose to put him in a brown sheepskin jacket with woolly white collar that makes him look like a cut-price, cut-down Bane from The Dark Knight Rises as well as paraphrasing that character a lot in his speeches about turning the people against the world and getting them rioting.

Sylvester Stallone himself is remarkably magnetic – he’s never been the world’s greatest actor, but he has long experience in how to make sure the audience is watching him, and Joe is quite identifiable-with as an ordinary guy trying to live quietly, while still having plenty of interesting layers.

Stallone also does a good job of playing to his age, which quite refreshing; he hurts, he has issues, he doesn’t get a 20-something girlfriend… It’s a good job of avoiding most of the tropes of such movies with aging action stars. In fact this may be his best actual character performance – with subtlety and everything in some places – in a good number of years.

Sadly there’s also bad, or at least troubled and disappointing elements to be found here. Most of the problems, it must be said, are some combination of low budget and a six month interruption to filming caused by Covid lockdowns while filming in Atlanta. For one thing, it’s very obvious that the whole thing is all located not spread across a large city, but in three buildings that seem to be together in in an industrial estate. On the upside this does give it the right sort of decayed air for a dystopian action movie in the Robocop vein (a connection lampshaded by the presence of a Robocop arcade game in Cyrus’s HQ.)

Likewise, while the fight scenes are solid and well-choreographed, there’s some disappointing obvious CG and wire assistance. and even the budget for dubious CG on the “blackout bombs” – grenades which produce actual wisps of darkness as well as an EMP blast – which stop producing wisps of darkness as the movie progresses.

Creatively, though, while one can accept necessary changes from the pandemic or budget issues, the biggest problem is that the opening narration – given over a more retro animation of Samaritan’s death – basically gives away the main plot development. Or twist, if you like. This sadly undercuts Stallone’s performance as a lot of the subtle clues that he puts in about Joe’s nature, such when he starts to get into a rage and forces himself to pause and do something different, become basically irrelevant in terms of being foreshadowing. They’re still a nice touch, though.

It’s interesting to note that the script was written in 2016 or so, but adapted into a comics series when funding wasn’t available for the movie, then went into production after the success of Overlord. So it’s kind of both a comic book movie, and not a comic book movie, because the comic was kind of a novelisation…

In any case, despite its flaws, there’s enough good work with Joe’s character, Sam, and the action scenes to make it an entertaining action flick, with one of Stallone’s best performances in years. This is especially true on a streaming service, whereas if it had made a cinema release those flaws with the budget and effects limitations would have hurt it a lot more.

Verdict: As a streaming movie, or if there’s a DVD or Blu-ray release, this is good fun, and even it’s not as great as Overlord it’s definitely worth a watch. 8/10

David A McIntee