The hardest movie to review isn’t necessarily an awful one, but something boring. It’s like eating wheat toast without any butter -- far from the worst thing you’ve experienced, but ultimately forgettable. Inheritance is one such film.
Maya is a young woman living in the city. Her mother, whom Maya has been looking after the past year, has recently passed away, and her estranged father uses the funeral as a way to talk to Maya about doing real estate work with him. I realize I’m not doing a good job of describing her character. The movie doesn’t either.
Director and writer Neil Burger is best known for the movie Limitless, which is another ho-hum movie but with the cast and budget to make it somewhat fun to watch. I read that this film was shot “guerilla-style” with phones and that they didn’t have time to set up scenes. To me, that says that Burger had no budget to work with and perhaps wasn’t used to this process.
The bulk of the plot involves Maya going through steps to save her dad who is secretly an information broker/spy with a shady past. It’s a wacky enough premise to work, similar to Taken, but the lack of compelling performances and exciting scenes makes the story fall flat.
It seems that half of this movie is just about Maya going through an airport or dealing with customs, and those scenes usually include extras that are most likely just hanging around in whatever city in which they are filming. It could be an attempt to make the movie more realistic, but when combined with the spy plot, it just adds to the awkwardness.
It’s the calling card of a cheap movie: when the director just shows us how the main character goes from place to place instead of letting the audience assume that it isn’t important enough to show. Imagine if every James Bond movie showed 007 going through airport security or arguing with someone about the currency exchange rate.
Another issue with the story is that Maya doesn’t have much of an arc. She is like a sad teenager, and when combined with the subpar script, you get a character that just isn’t worth caring about. In general, the movie lacks interesting characters – perhaps another symptom of a low budget.
A different movie with this premise and a small budget could have possibly worked. With a different script or a different director, this premise could have delivered a gripping, interesting film -- instead of what Inheritance really is: not terrible enough to be amusing, and not original enough to have any novelty value.
Author Bio:
Ulises Duenas is a senior writer and film critic at Highbrow Magazine.
For Highbrow Magazine