Legacy

I will tell you right off, I will spoil the ending of this movie.

Idris Elba delivers an intense portrayal of Malcolm Gray, a former black ops soldier preparing for... to be honest, I'm still not sure what his plan was. And to be honest, I don't think anyone really knew what the plan was. But let's break down the story. Malcolm Gray rents a shabby, sparse room with a street view and spends the next ninety minutes reliving the events that led him to the room, hallucinating about dead comrades and former loves, and planning something regarding his hawk Senator brother with eyes on the White House. We find out that his unit, a unit specializing in torture and execution, gets set up and Malcolm is tortured by a chemical weapons dealer because of what Malcolm did to his family. And who betrayed the unit? Why Senator Gray, who also created the unit and, as a benefit of setting up his own brother to be tortured and killed, gets to "foil" a chemical weapons attack on Washington DC and propel himself into the national spotlight. During all of this we see the disintegration of a man's mind, where at least I was never sure if any of what I was seeing was real or the imaginings of a dying mind, and that's what really spoiled this movie for me.

We all feel that way about this movie, Idris.

The only thing I am sure of in this film is that Malcolm Gray was tortured by a Ukrainian arms dealer and he commits suicide right at the end of the movie. The rest? I don't even know if the writer/producer/director really knew what was what with this thing. That's not to say that there wasn't anything good about this movie. Idris Elba brings an intensity to this role that, really, only he can. And I want to say something, anything really, about the rest of the cast but there just wasn't enough there. It was ninety minutes of Idris Elba losing his mind and then blowing it out and the path from A to B was really, just kinda tedious.

Rating: C-