First off, the story, although not overly original, is an interesting way to reopen the franchise. It doesn’t try to convolute itself with explanations and references to past films, nor does it overdo the horror - blasting the audience with incessant screams and splattering them with blood - instead focusing on delivering a clear and easy to follow movie with a beginning, middle and end. Furthermore, the characters are all largely likeable (even the token arsehole isn’t that bad), and the acting isn’t too shabby, which allows the audience to actually care when they start getting picked off one by one. Essentially, unlike what you’d expect from a film like this Legacy isn’t a poorly made bloodbath (literally), instead it is relatively well-crafted and it is evident that care went into making it.
Moreover, this care is shown particularly in their use of the crocodile (if you didn’t already know, the creature terrorising our characters). As a made for TV movie the budget obviously isn’t very large hence the CGI is a tad poor, however what I found so great about Legacy is that it knew what it had, it knew its limits and it used them to its advantage. Some may argue that they didn’t show enough of the creature, however honestly with the more serious direction they took this film in nothing would’ve ruined it more than constantly seeing a very clearly fake crocodile on screen. In my opinion, by showing the crocodile only through quick snippets, close-ups and for a large portion of the film only allowing us to hear it’s snarls added to the sense of a looming threat out to get these characters, which helped a lot by creating a real sense of tension. One of my favourite shots of the movie is when one of the characters sacrifices herself by luring the croc down a tunnel with a flare – this creates a beautiful red light to the shot which slowly fades to black as the camera equally as slow pans from only a bit of the crocodile’s face to the terrified look of our character. As I said, care went into making this film and it shows.
In conclusion, if you are a fan of the franchise, or of creature feature films in general I hope you will like this film. It reopens the franchise in a more serious way without being pretentious, and succeeds in being one of the better films (and best made films) of this certain persuasion/sub-genre. I was very pleasantly surprised and would definitely recommend it.