Mark Reviews Movies: INHERITANCE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 21, 2020

Inheritance tests its protagonist with more than a few moral quandaries, involving professional ethics and family loyalty and, oh, the matter of the guy chained up in an underground bunker in the backyard of the family home. Some moral questions are more obvious than others.

The problem with Matthew Kennedy's screenplay isn't how Lauren Monroe (Lily Collins) reacts to this long-hidden fact—keeping the stranger locked up, as she tries to discover his identity and figure out why her now-dead father had kept the man prisoner for decades. It's that the movie, directed by Vaughn Stein, seems to go out of its way to excuse and, ultimately, to justify the character's actions.

Instead of dealing with the inescapable notion that a person's actions define that person's character, the filmmakers distract us with mystery after mystery, revelation after revelation, and a final twist, after all appears to be said and done, that makes most of the setup's moral problems moot. They don't want Lauren to look as corrupt and criminal and morally bankrupt as her actions show her to be.

Lauren is the elder child of a wealthy and powerful family. Her father Archer (Patrick Warburton) has died of an apparent heart attack. Weeks later, she and the rest of the Monroe clan have arrived at the family's vast estate for the reading of the will.

Lauren, the district attorney for Manhattan, gets a million dollars. Her younger brother William (Chace Crawford), a congressman running for election, gets 20 million. Their mother Catherine (Connie Nielsen) insists that Archer was proud of Lauren's achievements, but a series of flashbacks, showing the father pushing his daughter in a certain direction, suggest differently.

The start of Lauren's multiple dilemmas comes when the father's faithful attorney (played by Michael Beach) hands her an envelope with a flash drive in it. Archer appears in a video, telling Lauren that he has a secret to pass on to her—one that she must take to her grave. After her father's final message point her to the mansion's yard, Lauren discovers a hidden bunker. Down a long concrete hall is a room, and in that room, there's a man with shaggy grey hair and a metal collar, chained to the wall, around his neck.

The man, who eventually says his name is Morgan Warner, is played by Simon Pegg. It's a different kind of performance for the actor (especially by the end of the movie), playing a man seemingly broken by decades of near-isolation. There are moments, such as when Lauren takes Morgan out into the world for the first time in a long time, of authenticity to Pegg's work here, but too much of the performance is overshadowed by the necessities of the plot and the character's unconvincing, sometimes silly physical appearance. On the latter end, Morgan keeps talking about wanting to live out "the few years" he has left in freedom, although he certainly doesn't as if he's on his last legs in terms of health or age. The hair, covering his face and later giving Pegg the appearance of playing Beethoven, doesn't help much, either.

As for Kennedy's plot mechanics, they continually shift Morgan's personality, depending on what needs to happen in the story. At first, he comes across as a sinister gamesman, teasing Lauren with his identity and the reason Archer imprisoned him. Later, he's vulnerable and desperate. We know one thing for sure: He wants out of this prison. Despite that, Morgan never makes any effort (It's particularly distracting during a field trip to a remote place where a dead body may be buried), and Kennedy's need to keep the character confined as long as possible, so as to ensure that the central mystery of the character's true nature can be revealed in steps, quickly becomes transparent.

The story has Lauren interrogating Morgan, asking a friend in the police department, questioning the lawyer, and hinting to her family about her father's past sins, while also trying to determine if anyone has a clue about Morgan's existence—without giving away the fact. It's convoluted and filled with red herrings (a mistress, shady campaign contributions to William, some financial malfeasance connected to a big case Lauren's prosecuting), and by the end, none of it really matters. The finale is all about what Morgan really wants and why.

All of this would be less of an issue if the filmmakers actually dug into Lauren's character, as she more or less follows in the immoral footsteps of the father from whom she tried to distance herself. Inheritance, though, uses its elaborate plotting as a way to evade such difficult questions about the protagonist. Neither the plot nor the character comes away looking too good by the end.

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