Is there such a thing as an action movie that's so determined to hit all the familiar spy beats that it becomes more like a blender set to “purée” than a piece of entertainment? With Legacy of Lies—Scott Adkins’s latest detour on the rocky road of genre pictures—the answer is an exhausting yes. Here’s a film that promises sleek muscle and instead delivers a plate of last week’s leftovers, reheated until even the flavor of violence goes flat.
Legacy of Lies, if titles meant anything, should be the biography of every screenwriter who’s ever tried to breathe new life into the superspy genre by crowding it with kitchen-sink cliché. The plot here is as fresh as a well-thumbed grocery list: Adkins, working overtime to convince us he’s haunted, retreats from the world after an unremarkable personal tragedy—has there ever been a sorrier parade of wounded men-of-action on film? The script pulls so slavishly from the Big Book of Heroic Sadness that I half expected to see a statue of this trope in the background, weeping movie tears.
Naturally, there’s an adorable daughter (Honor Kneafsey, a spark of life in a sea of cardboard), whose kidnapping cranks up the emotional thermostat from “lukewarm” to “tepid.” Cue the slow-motion montage—weight training, leather-jacket posturing, the kind of mournful grunting that passes for character development. Scott Adkins is doing his best imitation of a man ready for redemption, but the film seems content to keep him waiting on the platform, train never arriving.
The supporting cast starts to look like a community theater troupe wandering into the wrong building. Poor Martin McDougall, trapped in the role of an MI6 agent apparently allergic to urgency, delivers his lines with the commitment of a man reading safety warnings off a shampoo bottle. There are wax figures in Madame Tussauds that show more flickers of soul. His hairpiece deserves its own contract—by the third act, I began rooting for it, just hoping something, anything, might take flight. If ever a movie justified a “Best Supporting Wig” Oscar, this is it.
But Adkins is a pro—he brings the kind of battered charm that almost shames the script, almost makes you believe a dead-eyed, soulless actioner can be resuscitated by sheer triceps alone. The tragedy here is that he’s an actor who deserves better and can do better; he’s punching his way through wet tissue. And Honor Kneafsey, as daughter Lisa, radiates sincerity—so much so that you almost forget the rest of the movie is busy paddling in circles, looking for a point.
Direction? It’s as if the filmmakers stood on the sidelines, sheepishly counting down the days until they could cash their checks. Action sequences land with a thud, and the editing is so offhand that you start longing for the disciplined slapstick of backyard wrestling. Cinematography? Passable. If you like your scenery beautiful and your logic muzzled, welcome home.
Then there’s the bottom line, and—oh, what a bottom it is. A $4.5 million budget, with a take of $95,000. Not even a heist-movie twist could launder those numbers. It’s a heartbreak for Adkins fans: watching him kick, grimace, and sweat through a project this inert is like seeing a prizefighter shadowbox in a padded cell while the audience takes a nap.
Legacy of Lies. The title could be a warning. The only legacy here is a reminder to Adkins’s faithful: not every vehicle is worth riding, especially when there are this many flats along the way. The chemistry between Adkins and Kneafsey is the film’s sole precious metal in a landfill of fool’s gold; everyone else seems to be in a different, lesser movie, or perhaps sleepwalking through a different, lesser life.
For the thrill-seeker with a masochist streak, there’s a kind of rubbernecking pleasure to be found—marvel at the tumbleweeds of inspiration, and wince at performances so undercooked you can hear them moo. For the rest of us, Legacy of Lies is the kind of movie you regret picking up—and even deeper, the kind you regret watching Scott Adkins endure. Like the best of his roundhouse kicks, you hope he’ll land somewhere better in the sequel. If there ever is one.
