'The Samaritan' movie review

Samuel L. Jackson, starring in... Fury! Don’t be fooled: this has less than nothing to do with The Avengers or Jackson’s character over there, eyepatched S.H.I.E.L.D. boss Nick Fury. That you might make that mistake is the only possible explanation for the U.K. title change of this Canadian flick, which is called The Samaritan at home and will be called The Samaritan when it opens in the U.S in May. (Though why the title didn’t get a change on that side of the Atlantic remains a mystery.) “The Samaritan” is the name of the con that Jackson’s (Captain America: The First Avenger) just-out-of-prison ex-con is trying to avoid getting sucked into by the son, Ethan (Luke Kirby), of his former partner in crime, who has followed on in his father’s career footsteps of dirty rotten no-goodery. Jackson’s Foley just wants to go straight, keep his head down, and stay out of trouble, but Ethan won’t be put off. And then there’s the very pretty, very damaged, much younger Iris (Ruth Negga: Breakfast on Pluto), who latches onto Foley: is she just a sad lost little girl looking for a father-figure boyfriend, or is she playing the old guy for reasons of her own? The pleasures of the con movie are fully intact here, and will you spend a prickly-pleasant 90 minutes wondering how many layers of deception are at work, who’s fooling whom, and how much cowriter (with Elan Mastai) and director David Weaver are trying to fool us. If the trickery isn’t quite as multilayered as we might hope, there’s still Jackson’s furious performance to appreciate. He as fun to watch as he always is.