When Archer Monroe, patriarch of a powerful New York family, suddenly dies while driving his own car, his will divides the huge fortune among his numerous family members.
The daughter Lauren, Manhattan District Attorney, seems the most shaken by the tragic death and is also the only recipient of a video message shot by her father in the event that he passed away.
He directs her to the discovery of an underground bunker which is located inside the immense property and after entering it Lauren discovers that inside it is kept, segregated in inhumane conditions, a man. The mysterious individual claims that he has been imprisoned in that cramped structure for over thirty years and the girl is initially prey to the shock.
Questions after questions surface in his head and as the days go by he discovers more and more details about the reason for this cruelty: in fact, her wasted interlocutor begins to tell her burning secrets about his father and that could ruin the Monroe name forever. Lauren will now have to decide whether to do the right thing or leave the “condemned” to that eternal and dark agony without end.
A little credible mystery
After the frantic prologue, which lays the foundations for what will be, we have the hope of witnessing a thriller full of mystery and twists and when the key event, the backbone of what will be there to come, manifests itself in all its glossy brutality, an increasingly full and interesting story is expected.
Too bad after the first half hour Inheritance – The inheritance is already starting to fail, with a narrative that begins to wriggle and wriggle over forcing and improbabilities that take away credibility from the emotional heart of the story, up to that final revelation that adds nothing to what has been seen previously, resulting in yet another crippling of a story that never knows where to end up.
The sense of disorientation felt by the protagonist, ready to question what she has always believed about her father and the whole family, is never alive and palpable due to an excessively rapid and fast staging, which prevents you from fully delving into the characters and dynamics between them in place.
An involuntary parody
Director Vaughn Stein, in his second test behind the camera after the already mediocre Terminal (2018) with Margot Robbie, he can count also in this case on a cast of the great occasions, but he fails to take full advantage of it.
Lily Collins as the troubled main character is here anonymous and not at all involved in the complex affair that she has to manage in the first person, while Simon Pegg – initially unrecognizable from makeup – it appears as a sort of unhappy speck: of course, seeing him with an unprecedented gray wig and aged / ugly by the rough make-up is among the few paradoxically original elements of an otherwise stale and colorless operation, devoid of tension even in the phases that should have been arouse a minimum of anxiety and pain in the viewer.
The one between the two contenders is a sort of chess game and the numerous red herrings with which the script tries to deceive the public, making him side with a certain evolution, they seem moves of banal pawns.
But an experienced player / spectator will immediately understand how everything cannot be so simple and obvious: the lack of an effective sense of surprise at the discovery of the truth in the final stages is precisely the fault of an approach that behind his lack of ambiguity he sins of cunning, disregarding the lesson taught by the great classics of the vein.