The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch (2008)
"Largo Winch" (original title)

This movie is a real mixed big. On the other hand it's one great looking and well directed movie, with a pleasant pace and some good action but on the other it's being a real average one with its story and suffers from some weak acting as well.

It's actually a movie based on a Belgian novel- and comic-book-series. And it's not really hard to see why they wanted to turn it into a movie-series as well. It has a very typical movie style and way of storytelling to it, that reminds you of movie-series such as the Bourne Identity and James Bond ones. It has a thriller type of plot, hot women, plenty of action and hand-to-hand combat and some exotic locations as well. Yet as a movie this one does not really work out quite successfully. Also financially it was a disappointment but that didn't prevent them from making a sequel, with the poetic title "Largo Winch II", in 2011, which was not much of a success either. So it seems that the series is already over before anybody had really heard about it, unless some big Hollywood studio decides to pick it up and turn it into a movie-series, since the potential is all definitely still present in it.

It's a movie in which a secretly adopted son has to proof his legitimacy, in order to take over his murdered father's company, that is worth billions and prevent it from falling in the wrong hands of some shady business people. Doesn't sound like the most interesting perhaps and you're right to think so. It's mostly being a Industrial espionage thriller, with backstabbing characters and ones with double agendas, with some action thrown in it to spice up things. It just isn't really the most exciting concept to begin with and besides, the movie its story offers little new or surprising really. It all has been done before and better as well. It's all quite predictable, also in the way it's progressing.

But the film-makers didn't seemed to be stopped in their ambitions to still create a great movie, despite of its story. It's a real slick looking movie, with a great visual style to it. They also handled the action really well, with some good camera-work and nimble editing. I'm a fan of some good old fashioned hand-to-hand action and this movie has plenty of that. Really, I can't say anything bad about the directing approach of this movie. It also provides the movie with a pleasantly fast pace, which ensures that the movie, despite of its story, won't ever start to bore you.

And the movie also needed a fast pace, since it seemed to be covering lots of ground. It's set in many different countries, at many different places, with many different people. Yet they managed to fit it all into a 100 minutes short movie. It might cause you to loose track at times though. I mean, it's quite hard to understand at times why our main character is suddenly in a different country or how he got there in the first place.

But something that really truly brings this movie down is its acting. Most of the actors really got poorly cast in this and seem to belong on TV or soap operas only really. Kristin Scott Thomas is an exception and Benedict Wong also does a decent enough job but the rest were really struggling to get their lines out convincingly. Perhaps this was also partly due to it that most characters have to speak in many different languages. The movie mostly consists out of French, English and Serbian dialog, while some of the actors themselves aren't even French, English or Serbian. And hearing a French person utter some English words just never really sounds convincing. The lead actor Tomer Sisley was also really struggling with this and only seemed to be in his element during the action sequences.

Not a great movie by any means but still worth giving a go when you have run out of anything else to watch.

6/10

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