Legacy

I was shocked when I looked this movie up to see that its rating. For a film with a smaller budget it is excellent. Fans of The Wire will be pleased to see Idris Elba in a challenging role. Fans of Batman Begins/The Dark Knight, will recognize Joe Chill and Detective Ramirez. Eamonn Walker plays a sympathetic antagonist and brother to Idris Elba.

The film itself takes place after a failed mission and Malcom Gray (Idris Elba) holds up in a dingy apartment alone. As the film proceeds it becomes clear that not everything is what it seems. For a low budget psychological thriller, there is quite a lot of action.

Sadly, I think this movie is destined to be under-rated and under- appreciated. Give it a chance, you won't be disappointed.

I didn't know anything about this film when I finally got to see it. Kermode never reviewed it, Metacritic doesn't list it and several other sites I read didn't either. The reason I was looking for it was that I am a fan of Idris Elba – not a fan of all his films necessarily but a fan of what he can do since I am familiar with him from his quite brilliant turn as The Wire's Stringer Bell. The news that the film also had some other HBO actors I know (Walker from Oz, Peters from The Wire, Pulver from True Blood) only made me want to see it more – Eamonn Walker in particular was more than enough. But essentially the reason I came to the film was Elba and other than that I didn't know what the plot was or what to expect. I'll be honest and say I had some worries for several reasons: firstly it is a joint production with a Nigerian company and the few Nollywood films I have seen have been poor; secondly it was called "Legacy Black Ops" when I heard of it and I worried that it was trying to cash in on the Black Ops name since this is a rather large video game at the moment.

Anyway, despite my worries I actually quite enjoyed the film and found the 90 minutes to be mostly surprisingly gripping. Starting with a black ops mission that is going wrong we cut quickly to a cheap room in Brooklyn where one of the unit has holed up to complete "his mission". He talks to his video camera alone in his room; he is careful when he opens the door and he rarely answers the telephone. His ex (who married his brother while he was presumed dead) visits him in his room and he watches his brother (a presidential hopeful) being interviewed on TV. The structure of the film means we are mostly in the room that Malcolm has rented but we also have flashbacks to the mission he was on at the start of the film so that, while he follow his story now, we also see what has happened. What is happening now is that Malcolm appears to be trying to make up for his "sins" by exposing his brother's involvement in these black operations and in particular the fraud of a large sarin gas recovery on the East Coast by leaking details to a journalist. Throughout the film, in the time-honoured tradition, the pressure and the isolation appear to be taking their toll on Malcolm and his grip on sanity appears to be slipping.

In this regard the film does tread a rather worn path but I still found it engaging. I have seen others on IMDb say it was too long but for me it only started to get obvious that reality was maybe blurring around the halfway mark and it was only 90 minutes long so it did interest me. Splitting the two timelines along the movie means that it does hold the interest in both regards but unfortunately as the film starts to come together it doesn't gel as I had hoped. The ending is far too sudden and the film has not quite done enough with Malcolm's guilt to make it accessible to the viewer to the point that we really understand him – more dialogue between Macolm and his brother would have been one way to overcome this and I was hoping that the scene with them both in his room would produce more spark and more emotion. It still works but the material really needed to be stronger for the second half and I did feel it fell short.

One massive reason it still works though is Elba, and you can see why he took this low-budget movie made in Dumfries (Scotland) because the stage is his. Although the material doesn't give him everything he needs, he gets his delivery just right – gradually going from stable to unstable and with plenty of emotions to deliver. I enjoyed his performance a lot and I wish more films gave him the chance to show what he can do because he is a great actor. I know he is also in Thor at the moment and I hope that he can continue to get a good mix of small roles in large films and large roles in smaller films. The support cast are no slouches although they have less to do. Lie to Me's Curnen works well with Elba although she does inhabit this odd world that feels a little less real than it should in the early stages of the film. Peters is a solid presence – not sure what attracted him but he is a good find here. Walker disappointed me in terms of what he had to do – he is a good presence but the material lets him down as he is capable of more emotional range than he has here; like I said, his scene with Elba should have been so much more than it was – not just for the film's benefit but also for theirs as actors.

Overall Legacy is engaging film even if you know roughly the road it is going down. The material lets it down by not all pulling together as it should in the final third but it is still engaging thanks in the main part to a great performance from Elba, who really nails his character and convinces in every scene, whether it be torture, action or breakdown.

I was lucky enough to have seen Legacy at its world premiere closing the 2010 Glasgow Film Festival, where it was introduced by the producers and the writer/director Thomas Ikimi. The audience was informed of an intriguing production history – Ikimi had to source funding from personal contacts in Nigeria, the film was entirely shot in Scotland but mainly set in New York, and Idris Elba, who was also the Executive Producer, took advantage of his connections in the US to acquire much of the cast. Despite a seemingly infeasible gap between the ambitious aspirations and the miniscule budget, it largely succeeds in sustaining a credible and engaging dramatic narrative centred around a 'Black Ops' soldier dealing with the consequences of a failed mission and his earlier actions.

Elba plays Michael Gray, and his compelling central performance (he is in almost every scene) begins with an armed encounter in which his unit's attempt to tackle a Ukranian-born arms dealer ends catastrophically. Following ten months in a military hospital to overcome the torture that he is subsequently subjected to, he returns to Brooklyn and moves in to a run-down apartment for a period of reflection and contemplation. The impressive, elaborate plot that unfolds comfortably melds action sequences and art-house elements, and moves in a range of directions that simultaneously focus on psychological deterioration, the nature of political success (Gray's older brother is a senator on the verge of announcing a presidential campaign) and the responsibilities of the media.

Elba's robust performance aside, the film also features strong supporting acts (including his Wire co-star Clarke Peters) and some outstanding technical flourishes. I particularly liked the vibrant sound effects, from the deafening explosive gunfire to the subtle resonances that perfectly complemented the claustrophobic apartment setting, and the minimal but effective score. My one minor criticism is common to this sub-genre – an unreliable narrator who blurs the lines between the imagined and the real can lead to occasional frustration/confusion for the audience. It is, however, highly recommended, and a very welcome development for film-making in Scotland.

Legacy is an interesting film, to say the least. 90% of it is spent in a small hotel room, and follows the mental deterioration of a Black Ops soldier, recently returned from a botched mission in Eastern Europe, as he attempts a mission of self-retribution and revenge. It's a psychological thriller with stylistic hallmarks of greats from a bygone era ('Manchurian Candidate' and Hitchcock's 'Rear Window' spring to mind), where suspense and tension were paramount, instead of fast-paced action and explosive thrills.

A claustrophobic, slow-burning film like this lives or dies on it's performances, and Legacy really shines in that area, with Idris Elba playing the lead role with haunting intensity. The rest of the cast do great jobs as well.

The editing and cinematography are tight, and fit the dark, brooding mood of the film effectively.

The main story itself is gripping in all the right places, and is well paced, but there were one or two confusing moments where I felt a bit lost, and found myself wondering if I'd missed something important.

You owe it to yourself to check this out if you're a fan of strong acting, and clever, suspenseful thrillers.

This movie has a problem that many movies have: it's a story that could be told in less than an hour but the film makers felt they had to expand it to fit feature length. It's well made, and the acting is great, but it gets tiring very fast. The suspense sags and the ending just isn't justified by all the waiting. To compare it to Hitchcock is absurd.

Malcolm is a psychologically wounded soldier back from a clandestine operation. He's holed up in a shabby hotel room fighting his demons. He was a member of a covert operation that went bad, he wound up killing the family of a terrorist, and then, to make things worse, was captured and tortured by the very terrorist whose family he had killed. We come to understand that he was betrayed, but who betrayed him? And was the betrayal necessary to protect the operation or was it just to cover someone's behind?

Now he's escaped from an army medical facility and is mentally disintegrating by himself in that shabby room. Some elements of the film are hardly believable and what is real and what is imagined is never really clear.

That war can have devastating psychological effects on soldiers is well known. But we also want to know the mechanics of the operation that went wrong, and the decisions that were made. The operation was set up in order to stop a dangerous terrorist who was in possession of a large quantity of sarin gas, and is intent on wiping out a major American city, at least the infidels who live in it. These details are in the background and are leaked out as the movie progresses, at least to the extent we can believe Malcolm, who is clearly delusional and drunk most of the time. Even in his right mind Malcolm may not know what happened at the highest levels. Meanwhile we have to watch Malcolm going crazy and telling his story in a rambling, confused videotape. The craziness, though skillfully performed, obscures our understanding the the story, so we're left wondering what really went down.

We can sympathize with his pain. Brave soldiers can be scarred for life, but having to wait for plot elements to emerge while watching Malcolm disintegrate in his paranoia and guilt is excruciating. In fact, the only real suspense is wondering what Malcolm is finally going to do to resolve his dilemma. When the ending comes it's an anti-climax. There are no bad guys here (except the terrorists) and really no sense of justice because it's difficult to know for sure who was involved or what decisions were made. Moral clarity is something you need for a successful thriller, but here the moral lines are blurred.