5. Poor Editing
Though Gilroy's action scenes are edited well enough - despite lacking the flair of Greengrass' ones - it is the overall scope of the edit that feels unfussed and careless. With a running time of 135-minutes, the film feels excessively long, especially when considering the lengthy prologue portion, and the focus on verbose dialogue. Were the film a dense 135-minutes, this might not have come up, yet one can't help but think Legacy is slack and could have been easily trimmed back by a good half an hour. The opening section especially, which introduces us to a silent Cross for 15 minutes, and leaves him stranded on his own for a good deal longer, could have been contracted into no more than 30 minutes, making the main focus of the film his trip to the States to procure Shearing. At 105 minutes, the film would feel much tighter, and the lack of action in these opening portions might not seem so bad. One suspects this is because Gilroy is first and foremost a writer, not a director, and though Michael Clayton never felt overstuffed, his divisive
Duplicity, which ran in at 125 minutes, certainly did. With his brother, John Gilroy, taking editing duties - and he also worked on the incredibly long
Warrior - perhaps he is in need of a more judicious force in the editing room to make tough calls. Though frankly, there's a lot of airy silence and scenes of leaden dialogue that could have been trimmed entirely and made the film substantially more watchable. As it stands, 135-minutes is quite a sit, and if the film is merely not awful, that's not a particularly ringing endorsement to audiences.