Delayed Reaction: Inheritance

Premise: After her father dies, a woman discovers her inheritance is a man he's kept locked in a basement for years.

 

This is a movie you see if you want a Lily Collins injection. I can't see much more of a reason to watch it. I'm certainly not watching it for nearly 2-hours of Simon Pegg adopting an American accent. It's not exactly a bad American accent. There are just some voices not meant to do accent work. Sam Elliot is never going to be from Liverpool. John Oliver won't be a guy from the Bronx any time soon. Simon Pegg is one of those people. Even if he's in an American movie, filmmakers know to just let him be British and assume audiences won't get confused. That was the unintentional horror of this movie. He's so unsettling as American.

 

The kernel of the movie is pretty fun. It's a thriller that goes big. The question of why Pegg's character is chained up is really intriguing. Years of Hollywood telling us that every businessman and rich guy is evil makes it easy to assume that Pegg is wrongfully tethered, so it makes for a nice reveal when it turns out he's a monster. The end of the movie is pretty nutty. The movie waits way too long for the nuttiness though. I mean, it starts off with a man chained in an underground bunker. Then it spends an hour normalizing that before getting weird again at the end. Just imagine where the movie could've ended up had they used the premise as an excuse to keep getting crazier.

 

In the right context, I think Lily Collins is a good actress. Something like Emily in Paris understands her perfectly. I admit that I have some blinders when it comes to her because she is also someone I like to look at. So, I'll put up with her being bad much easier than I would a lot of other performers. She seems thoroughly out of her element in a movie like Inheritance. However, Rooney Mara was originally cast, and it's not like I think she could've made it work much better. It really wastes a good idea by letting the tension peter out in the middle.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend