Idris Elba is Malcolm Gray, who is part of a secret team that does various missions all over the world. During one of their missions in Eastern Europe things don’t go as planned and Malcolm leaves scarred, both emotionally as psychically. When he’s back in America he locks himself in an apartment to allow himself to find out what went wrong and who’s responsible for it.
Legacy is mostly set in one location, something we’ve seen in quite a lot of movies this year, like Buried, 127 Hours (reviewed tomorrow) and Skyline. It’s difficult to make it work and you need a very strong script to be able to pull it off. Unfortunately Legacy doesn’t.
Idris Elba tries hard to play his character of a broken man, but wasn’t always as convincing. He was regularly overacting, which really pulled my out of the film. He’s capable of more as he has shown in The Wire.
I didn’t like the editing either as the story jumps in time, which just didn’t work. It can be very effective, but because the tempo of the movie sometimes slowed to a crawl I just didn’t care about the character anymore after a while. I must admit that the ending was very strong and unexpected.
If you are looking for a psychological thriller I can’t really recommend you to see Legacy. Although Idris Elba proves he can star in a movie, I just couldn’t get into the story this movie tried to tell. My expectations of this movie weren’t very high to begin with, but unfortunately the movie managed to meet them.
Score: 4