'Emily the Criminal' excels; 'Samaritan' stumbles

'Emily the Criminal'

I went to see "Emily the Criminal" expecting a brisk, taut crime caper that would afford one of my favorite comedic actresses a well-deserved showcase to stretch her dramatic muscles, but what I also got was a political Rorschach test whose concerns seem especially relevant in light of debates about student loan debt forgiveness.

It's easy to dismiss Aubrey Plaza's Emily as an adult child of squandered opportunities, who dropped out of college after racking up a felony conviction that continues to pop up on background checks when she applies for white-collar jobs, and she doesn't engender sympathy by being evasive and confrontational about it by turns.

But as someone who logged some hours in food service in my younger years, I empathized with the frustrations she feels from the million little microaggressions of her punishing working conditions doing meal deliveries.

The myriad ways in which Emily is exploited as a minimum-wage "independent contractor" stand in stark contrast to her fabulously successful school friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke) casually complaining about her business trips to exotic locales being too brief.

Emily has had lifelong unfulfilled dreams of international travel, but Liz's corporate-sponsored jaunt to Portugal is "only" 11 days.

When Emily agrees to cover a meal delivery coworker's shift, he thanks her by supplying her with a contact to become a "dummy shopper," during which she's supplied fraudulent credit cards to buy expensive consumer goods for third parties to resell illegally.

Although Emily's recurring notepad sketches indicate a lingering interest in pursuing the art career for which she moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles to attend college, and went into student loan debt for the usurious amount of $70,000, it's when she's tested by the high-risk conditions of her criminal career that something awakens inside of Emily.

This film commendably refrains from depicting credit card fraud as either glamorous or aspirational, and yet, even when Emily's crimes result in her facing direct threats to life and limb, it still somehow feels less demeaning than the admittedly far more mundane drudgery of fighting for more work shifts at her "legitimate" job.

Indeed, while Emily is arguably seduced into deeper participation in this lifestyle by Youcef (Theo Rossi), a charismatic Lebanese immigrant and scam organizer, it turns out Youcef is only raising money to meet his genuinely held - and as it turns out, slightly naïve - goals of becoming a legitimate businessman.

As circumstances push the pair to either go even further, or else lose all the gains they've made to that point, it leads to a role-reversal between the two, as Emily's former mentor in criminality tells her, "You're a very bad influence."

The message of "Emily the Criminal" comes together when Liz scores Emily a shot at working for her ad agency, but when Emily objects to learning it would be an internship that would go unpaid for the first five months, Liz's boss Alice (Gina Gershon) accuses Emily of being "spoiled."

Emily suffers from no shortage of significant character flaws, but after we've seen her go after her own attackers to reclaim her ill-gotten gains, turning their threats back against them, it shows how out-of-touch the rest of the world is to dismiss her as "spoiled."

Rather, Emily is a survivor, bred by the same system that sought to grind her down for so long, and her progressively sharklike momentum is fascinating to behold.

Rossi's relaxed scumbag charm makes Youcef's ill-considered relationship with Emily feel real, while Gershon's cameo can't help but come across as a nice nod to all the journeyman character actor work she did back when she was Plaza's age.

As for Plaza herself, her deceptively restrained range of facial expressions makes it easy to miss all the deeper emotional work she's doing under the surface.

'Samaritan'

I've always rooted for Sylvester Stallone because he's proven to be more talented and more thoughtful than too many folks are inclined to give him credit for.

But even as a fan, I must admit the man's skills have been wildly hit-or-miss throughout his career, and never more so than during his most recent revival era.

The same guy who was so heartbreakingly good in the two "Creed" films managed to misunderstand the whole point of one of his two signature characters in "Rambo: Last Blood," which desecrated the legacy of "First Blood" even more than any of its preceding sequels.

So when I saw that "Samaritan" on Amazon Prime had cast an aging Stallone as a retired super-person in hiding, in an archetypal crime-ridden big city that had lost its hope, I had to give my man a chance, especially since "Stallone as a superhero" seems like such a natural peanut-butter-and-chocolate combo that I'm amazed it was never attempted before (his cameo in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" notwithstanding).

I'll lead with the positives, because much like Detroit's depiction in 1994's "The Crow," or the unnamed, frequently rainy big city of 1995's "Se7en," or even the eclectically retro-stylized "Dark City" of 1998, "Samaritan" invests its fictional setting of "Granite City" with a frisson of heightened realism.

For a metropolis that consists of little more than factory warehouses, litter-strewn alleyways and decaying housing projects, Granite City feels like it deserves a far richer history and mythos than the relatively simplistic sibling rivalry fable for which it serves as a stage.

We're informed through flashback narration that super-powered twin brothers Samaritan and Nemesis were driven onto the opposing paths of hero versus villain by experiencing the exact same childhood traumas, including their persecution for being different.

There's a seed of potential there, for exploring the roots of nature versus nurture, and when street gang leader Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk) preaches to his makeshift adoptive family of young followers about how Samaritan was simply a servant of those who already wielded power, while Nemesis, in Cyrus' view, gave a voice to the city's dispossessed, another door of storytelling possibilities is nudged open a crack.

Unfortunately, none of these potential narratives are followed up on in any meaningful way, as Cyrus reverts to following the standard Batman movie villain script of blowing up and/or shutting down the city.

Likewise, for all the unspoken weight of unhealed wounds and bone-weariness with which Stallone imbues his character, his work as an actor is sabotaged by a third-act "twist" reveal so obvious that, simply by mentioning that it exists, I'm probably giving you enough information to figure it out beforehand.

It's a shame, because in between rounds of Stallone laying super-powered smackdowns on his opponents, I was hoping "Samaritan" might fulfill its teases of an aging super-person, weighing what's legal against what's right, and asking himself how his years of activity might have tipped those scales one way or the other, but oh well.

"Samaritan" aims to emulate M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," right down to Bruce Willis' signature hoodie, but it ultimately comes closer to recreating the 1990s and turn-of-the-millennium-era superhero comics adaptations like Pamela Anderson's "Barb Wire."

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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