Maybe
you thought folks were generally nice up in Oregon, like it’s the American
Canada, except for Tonya Harding’s mother. Yet, they have plenty of psychopaths
too. For instance, Ted Bundy stalked some victims there. Cale Erendreich is a
similarly clean-cut looking serial killer, but the entitled creep is definitely
not a charmer. Thanks to his wealth, he has evaded detection for years, but a clueless
valet-parking burglar is about to blunder across his latest victim in Dean
Devlin’s Bad Samaritan (trailer here), which opens today
nationwide.
Sean
Falco and his crony Derek Sandoval had a pretty good racket going. They talked
their way into the valet parking concession at what is apparently Portland’s
only upscale Italian restaurant, so they can use the cars’ GPS and garage door
openers to plunder small, easily liquidated items that would not be immediately
missed. Falco thinks he has hit the jackpot with Erendreich’s swanky pad, until
he finds a woman chained up in the study.
Spooked
by the killer’s state-of-the-art surveillance, Falco beats a hasty retreat, but
he tries to anonymously drop a dime with the cops. However, Erendreich is like
Mary Poppins when it comes to quickly tidying up incriminating evidence, like a
woman in restraints. Naturally, the Portland cops immediately decide Falco is a
crank, or worse. The FBI is a little bit smarter, but they are still bound by
procedure and red tape. That basically leaves Falco on his own when Erendreich starts
stalking the would-be thief and everyone close to him.
Bad Samaritan is not exactly
high art, but it is compulsively watchable in a lurid, one-darned-thing-after-another
kind of way. One thing is for sure: David Tennant came to play. He preens like a
peacock and absolutely gorges on the scenery as the ultra-sinister and uber-elitist
Erendreich. Frankly, Robert Sheehan is such an underwhelming sad sack (most of
the time his looks like a water-logged dog who was caught in a torrential
downpour), it is difficult to believe he can be remotely competitive with the
coolly and cruelly manipulative killer. Frankly, Carlito Olivero consistently
up-stages and over-shadows him as the exponentially more dynamic Sandoval.
