Name: Inheritance Review
Director: Vaughn Stein
Released: 2020-05-22T22:43:00

The story writing for the Inheritance movie can be both applauded and denounced. The first quarter of the film is strong, but unfortunately, this feeling drains away throughout the film. The opening is great at stirring up the mystery component. It immediately culminates when siblings Will and Lauren $20 million and $1 million apiece after a death in the family. For Lauren, this was seemingly expected and the brother and sister trade ‘golden child’ remarks despite a solid brother and sister relationship.

Then the family’s lawyer, Harold slips a sealed yellow envelope into Lauren’s hands. In it is a USB drive that shows her father Archer in a pre-recorded video message. He gives the instructions that tell her where the family secrets are kept.

Inheritance 2020 Cast

The movie was released in 2020 and is a hard film to review without giving the ending away. The Inheritance film cast sees Simon Pegg, Chace Crawford, and Lilly Collins bring the film’s classic skeleton in the closet narrative to life. Patrick Warburton stars, as Archer, the rough and ready daddy of a prominent family. Collins and Crawford are siblings Lauren and William, both high-profile up-and-comers who suddenly find themselves at a reading of the will when Archer drops dead of a heart attack. Performances are good and feature as a strength of the movie overall.

If the movie sounds like it’s got lots going on, it does. The opening scenes are where all the tension and mystery are laid out. However, if you don’t want to know what Archer buried, go and watch the film and know that it’s a solid mystery movie, but also completely predictable. Performances are excellent for everyone involved. Simon Pegg brings his A-game to his role as Morgan. Crawford does his best to shake clean of the imagery of his character “The Deep” from his awesome role in The Boys series, but it’s all I can think about every time I see him in the shot. And herein this movie review for Inheritance ceases to be spoiler-free.

Inheritance Advance

From here, a guessing game begins but it’s also where the problems start. Lauren is supposed to be smart. She’s a district attorney who’s spent years being curtailed by her father’s approval. She’s the black sheep of the family because of her morals and desire to do good. Lauren has plenty of resources to assist her in solving a mystery yet makes decisions based purely on gut instinct. The skeleton in the literal ‘closet,’ an underground bunker on the family estate, gives her Morgan.

In light of the great setup, the narrative is muddied making it unable to execute the smart thriller that lives inside it. One that walks the line between choosing to right a wrong or protect the family. It almost hits the intended target until the story by Matthew Kennedy shows its hand too early. There are too many clues dropped into your lap early that ruin the surprise smushed into the end sequence. The tension is swapped for moments of wondering why a high-priced lawyer would jump to conclusions based on little hard evidence.

Inheritance Movie 2020

Around the middle of “Inheritance”, the pace begins to lag and many will simply be sticking around to see it out or find out if their conclusions were right. There were a lot more instances where common sense simply fell by the wayside, but I’m not going to mention them all. I will add that watching a man who had been captive for 30 years pinpoint a buried body in the middle of the night was something that irked me for various reasons.

In this instance, I was left unable to get behind any of the characters’ motivations by the time the ending for Inheritance rolled around. Characters simply weren’t consistent enough. Were Morgans’ crimes worthy of his sentence? Was Lauren just as morally corrupt as the rest of her family? Why didn’t Morgan take the money and run? After all, is said and done, Inheritance leaves more questions than answers and some will find that refreshing.

I give Inheritance

3 I’d be in the Caymans out of 5