“INHERITANCE” My rating: C (Netflix)
111 minutes | No MPAA rating
Netflix’s thriller “Inheritance” is marked by not just one but TWO cases of what appears to be major miscasting.
The first big gulp comes when we discover that Lily Collins, she of the impossibly cute “Emily in Paris” (i bailed on Season Two), has been cast as the hard-driving Manhattan District Attorney.
No, I didn’t buy it, either.
The second involves the casting of Simon Pegg, usually just the fellow to provide light comic relief, in the heavy-duty dramatic role of…well, let’s let that sit for a minute.
Here’s the setup: After the heart attack death of her filthy rich banker daddy Archer (Patrick Warburton, in and out so fast you might not recognize him), DA Lauren Monroe (Collins) learns from the family lawyer that the old man has entrusted to her his most deeply-hidden secret.
Not some sort of business fraud, although Archer obviously played loosely with the SEC regs. And not the mistress he kept in the city unbeknownst to his wife (Connie Nielsen). Not even the illegitimate child he had with her.
Nah, all that stuff is standard issue for a rich mover and shaker.
Following cryptic clues left behind by Daddy, Lauren uncovers an old bunker (must have been a fallout shelter) in the woods on the family’s estate. Inside she discovers a bearded, hairy man chained by the neck in a dark cell. He tells the shocked Lauren that he has been imprisoned by her late Papa for more than 30 years.
This modern-day Ben Gunn is played by Pegg, and what with all the hirsute prosthetics and a sepulcher-appropriate voice he’s virtually unrecognizable. It took me about 10 minutes before I exclaimed “Holy shit! Simon Pegg!”
The woeful tale this poor soul relates involves an accidental death, a gravesite deep in the forest and Archer’s fear that a witness to his perfidy could nip his financial career in the bud. Unwilling to commit murder, he instead becomes a jailor, visiting his prisoner just often enough to keep him stocked in protein powder and toilet paper.
Which leaves Lauren with a moral dilemma. Should she free the man, thus risking not only her career but that of her brother (“The Boys’” Chace Crawford), a Congressman in the middle of a tough re-election campaign?
Should she keep him alive and in chains…but for how long?
That “Inheritance” works at all is due to Pegg’s canny balancing act. His prisoner is by turns tearful, pathetic, manipulative and threatening. We want to be sympathetic but, like Lauren, we wonder how much of his story to believe. The dude seems sane and rational, but after decades in the dark mightn’t he be, well, a bit off?
It makes for a couple of tasty scenes.
Alas, in the third act Matthew Kennedy’s screenplay devolves into thriller-film cliches…and it cannot outrun the many improbabilities we’re asked to swallow to keep the yarn moving. Vaughn Stein’s direction is functional but style-less.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 