Sunday, 1 May 2011

LEGACY: BLACK OPS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS, ALTHOUGH I'LL TALK AROUND THE BIGGEST ONE AS BEST I CAN

Special Forces team leader Malcolm Grey (Idris Elba) gets back to America after a mission goes disastrously wrong, determined to purge his conscience of the crimes committed as a Black Ops operative. He contacts a liberal press journalist to give her classified details of morally questionable missions carried out at the behest of his own brother Eamonn Walker, now a Senator with eyes on the Presidency. He meets up with his ex-girlfriend, now the Senator's partner, as well as his old Special Forces comrades. He films himself with a camcorder justifying his actions and explaining the conspiracies behind them. But what really happened on that last mission? It gradually becomes clear that we're watching a man having a complete mental collapse.

For much of the time in Legacy: Black Ops, the screen is held by Elba alone: ranting, shouting, shooting, increasingly erratic and paranoid. To what extent is it all real? The final shots hold the clue to exactly what's been going on throughout the whole film. But the psychological breakdown of one man, obviously seriously damaged by the horrors of war, is more theatrical than cinematic - surprisingly, given the fact that all but a few scenes take place in the same shabby Brooklyn apartment, the film doesn't have its origins as a stage play, where it would probably work quite well: even the climactic act is only seen indirectly via the flat's TV set.

Thomas Ikimi's film is a British-Nigerian co-production, set mainly in New York but bizarrely shot entirely in Dumfries and Galloway, including the early sequences set in Eastern Europe where Elba's final mission degenerates into torture and death. It's an interesting film if not entirely successful, looking at the rights and wrongs of aggressive military actions; Elba's terrific, but the reality of what's going on is apparent quite early on and that doesnt make it very exciting as a drama if you know pretty well what's really going on. Certainly it's worth watching but it's not a great film.

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