In short: Legacy of Lies (2020)

Twelve years ago, a mission in Kiev to retrieve documents concerning a secret Russian assassination program went very badly indeed for MI-6 agent Martin Baxter (Scott Adkins), not just ending with him losing the documents but also with the death of the mother of his child through one of his own bullets.

Now, a retired Baxter moves across Britain with his precocious twelve year old daughter Lisa (Honor Kneafsay), earning their keep with underground fights (it’s a Scott Adkins movie, remember) and work as a bouncer. The last few months seem to have been particularly hard for Baxter, his PTSD symptoms now even including waking visions of his dead wife. That’s a timely development, too, for Sacha (Yuliia Sobol), the daughter of one of the people killed during that very bad mission seeks Baxter out looking for help in acquiring the same old documents of twelve years ago.

Of course, she’s not the only one looking for them – Baxter’s old colleagues from MI-6, the CIA (or maybe the NSA) as well as the Russians are also very much still interested in them. When the Russians kidnap Lisa, Baxter really has no other choice than to resolve the issues of his past violently.

Among the considerable number of low budget movies starring the great Scott Adkins, Adrian Bol’s espionage action movie has a decent place somewhere in the quality middle. Even though it is not as much of a cheap and awesome action extravaganza as some films featuring Adkins are, there’s more than enough of the fun violence to keep me happy. Most of it is choreographed and shot very well, too, but the emphasis of the film is elsewhere. For this one seems genuinely interested in Adkins’s tragic past, and the way it shapes his relationship with his daughter as more than just a device to keep the action going. It doesn’t come to any startling new insights about these things, but I can’t help but respect when a movie like this that could get away with simply showing Adkins punching and shooting people puts actual effort into characters and their relationships. This doesn’t keep Legacy of Lies from having some pretty silly ideas, but those, you can really only read as the film trying not to be boring.

While the action stays fun bread and butter stuff, and the plot makes just as much sense as it needs to be, it’s the character work that throws some interesting curveballs. Of particular interest is how the completely ruthless Russian agent (Anna Butkevich) in charge of Lisa treats her, acting like a genuine human being with hang-ups and an inner life, the film daring to turn one of its villains into something amounting to a human being without getting all soppy or pretending she’s just a nice decent woman at heart. Rather, the film says, she’s complicated. Which may not sound like much, but is a pretty fine thing to see in any low budget action movie.

In short: Crooked House (2017)

On paper, Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Agatha Christie adaptation of one of her more interesting books even for a Christie-sceptic like myself should be right up my alley. It does, after all consist of pretty yet excellent actors like Max Irons, Stefanie Martini, Glenn Close and Christina Hendricks broadly strutting their stuff in front of sets so stylized to be of the 50s your eyeballs might melt and you might just feel they have nothing at all to do with the actual feel of the era the director looks at here. It also features show-off camera tricks that’d make young Brian De Palma blush or (gasp) request moderation. But in practice, I had little joy with the thing, for this isn’t a case of style as substance but a film akin to watching a director you’re really not terribly into masturbate to his own image for two hours straight. There’s little emotional or thematic point to anything going on here, apart from the usual suggestion that the rich are vile, pretty, and spend all their time getting their outfits in photogenic shapes. Instead of having much at all to say, the film is just a parade of loud but empty gestures that never add up to much, and while it is pretty to look at, it’s the prettiness of a particularly empty head. While there’s a surfeit at excellent actors on screen, there’s only so much anyone can do when asked to inhabit an empty shell.

The mystery is probably well-constructed (though the “shocking twist” is neither well realized by the film nor terribly shocking for anyone who has seen a horror movie or three), but at about half of the film’s running time, I found myself encountering a very typical feeling when it comes to me and traditional manor house mysteries: the realization that I not only didn’t care which of these high-strung arseholes killed their arsehole pater familias, but was hoping for the rest of them to be killed off too right quick (spoilers: not much joy there). Which probably isn’t the kind of emotional involvement the thing is going for, but a boy must distract himself somehow when a film’s aesthetics are quite this pointlessly tacky, and there’s no intellectual stimulation to be had by it either.


So this turns out to be pretty much the film I unfairly expected Brannagh’s Murder on the Orient Express to be.

In short: Slumber (2017)

Doctor Alice Arnolds (Maggie Q) is working as a researcher and therapist in a sleep lab. She does have the appropriate childhood trauma to cause her interest in this kind of work, as mandated by movie law, for when they were children, her little brother jumped to his death while sleepwalking. Or really, as it will turn out when a family, the Morgans, come to her for help with a shared sleepwalking problem that finds all of them sleepwalking and doing creepy and potentially violent stuff, was killed by the demon known as the Nigh Hag.

For a while, Alice tries to keep to a scientific and medical view on the family’s problems, but as strange things are happening all around the Morgans, she is soon starting on a way that might cost her life or at least her career.

Jonathan Hopkins’s Slumber is a very entertaining entry in the sub-genre of sleep paralysis horror. It’s not the most carefully plotted film, and its monster design – once we get to see it – certainly isn’t very good at all, but there are quite a few things to recommend it. Firstly, it does contain at least three truly creepy scenes concentrating on what the night hag makes the Morgans do in their sleep, suggesting a shadow of abuse, self-mutilation and violence hanging over an apparently perfectly functional family, very much giving the impression of something praying on unconscious – or at least unspoken - psychological issues and tensions the supernatural is only bringing to the surface. Hopkins is also quite adept at staging dream sequences that feel like dreams, with strange and somewhat disturbing non-sequiturs, a talent that (surprise!) comes in very handy in a film about a dream demon.


Secondly, there’s a pretty fantastic scenery-chewing outing by Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy as an elderly, drugged up, former night hag victim with a fascinating taste in clothing, and some neat eye-mutilation scars that turns a Joe Exposition role into pure, if absolutely grotesque, joy. Somehow, whatever it is McCoy is doing (having fun, it looks like, at the very least) doesn’t break a film full of earnest, competent performances by everyone else but enhances it considerably.