After her tycoon father dies under frantic, fast-cutting circumstances (so much so that this movie’s opening minutes look like a trailer, or a parody of one), Lauren (Lily Collins) gets the short end of the stick, money wise, and something worse. She’s made the ward of a man, played by Simon Pegg, whom her father has held captive in a bunker on the family’s property for untold years.
Collins’s character, an idealistic prosecutor, is the one family member who doesn’t hew to its rapacious, arguably anti-humanist values. But on discovering her dad’s victim, she acts like a hysterical entitled clod.
This gains her little in terms of moral standing. But “Inheritance,” directed by Vaughn Stein, insists on maintaining Collins’s heroine status. In part to satisfy its plot twists, but also to connote an especially complacent acceptance of the idea that horrible rich idiots running the world is just the way things are. Ick.
Pegg is reported to have lost considerable weight to play his role, and from the neck down he does appear famished; too bad he sports a wig that looks as if it were stolen from the props department of “Yacht Rock.” He tips his hand to the true nature of his character by (spoiler alert?) delivering some dialogue with the flat affect associated with Anthony Hopkins’s most famous film role.
This movie aspires to generate the kind of rich-people-you-love-to-hate juice of cable TV series such as “Billions” and “Succession.” Ultimately, “Inheritance” doesn’t even get to the level of “Dynasty.”
Inheritance
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
