There's a reason that Steven Soderbergh can grab an iPhone and a handful of actors and make a great movie in a short amount of time: He's Steven Soderbergh. With his shoddy iPhone-shot espionage thriller Inheritance, director and co-writer Neil Burger proves that he's no Steven Soderbergh, even as he's clearly aiming to emulate sleek, suspenseful Soderbergh movies like Haywire and Kimi. Burger, a veteran of mid-level studio garbage like Divergent and Limitless, brings the same mediocrity of vision to this much lower-budget project, only without glossy production values to distract from the haphazard plotting and cardboard characters.
Burger does, however, have some star power in the form of Bridgerton's Phoebe Dynevor, although she never quite seems comfortable as a gritty, determined New Yorker. Dynevor's Maya is introduced on a whirlwind self-destructive tour over the course of a single night — shoplifting liquor, dancing at a crowded nightclub, having sex with a random dude, then smoking a postcoital cigarette while dangling out the window of her upper-level apartment. It's faux-edgy overkill to demonstrate that Maya is in a bad place emotionally. Her mother has just died after a long illness, and it doesn't help that she spots her estranged father Sam (Rhys Ifans) at her mother's funeral the next day.
The obviously shady Sam attempts to reconcile with Maya by offering her a job with his nebulously defined international real estate company, which requires her to travel to Cairo to meet with his associates. Almost immediately upon arriving in Cairo, she's thrust into the middle of a clandestine operation she doesn't understand, as Sam may have been kidnapped... or he may just be manipulating her into carrying out his illicit agenda. Maya travels from Egypt to India to South Korea, but she might as well just be walking through various NYC enclaves, for all of the unique flavor that Burger brings to each far-flung locale.
Rather than allowing for nimble globe-trotting adventure, shooting on an iPhone flattens out the various locations into one ugly digital backdrop, with no more visual flair than a hasty FaceTime call. Burger and cinematographer Jackson Hunt rely on awkward close-ups that seem like they're meant to convey urgency but instead just look like the filmmakers couldn't find anything else to place in the frame. There's one makeshift car chase through the streets of Delhi, but otherwise the pared-down production shuffles from place to place without any momentum or action.
It's not like the story is engaging enough to make up for the aesthetic shortcomings, either. The threadbare plot is full of holes, with Maya consistently evading capture via basic, easily thwarted means. Sam weaves in and out of the narrative, but otherwise there are no other characters of note, leaving Maya stranded in a vacuum, without enemies or allies. Her occasional interactions with suspicious strangers ultimately amount to nothing, which is the end result of the entire plot, too.
Burger and co-writer Olen Steinhauer craft such a flimsy espionage story that when a character discovers an all-important computer file, it's literally labeled "covert-projects-report.pdf." What covert projects are in this report? Neither Maya nor the filmmakers appear to care, and not in a cool, detached, mysterious way, but rather in a way that suggests no one has bothered to think any of this through.
Both Dynevor and Ifans struggle with their American accents, which adds to the slapdash feel, especially since there's no real reason their characters needed to be American. They stumble clumsily through this facsimile of a spy thriller, with a chintzy-sounding electronic score and a Jason Bourne-lite conspiracy framework. Rather than energetic and innovative, the monotonous Inheritance merely comes off as a failed pretender.
Inheritance
Rated R
Directed by Neil Burger
Starring Phoebe Dynevor, Rhys Ifans
