You’re not much of a detective, are you?
Well, to be fair, you make a pretty lousy murderer.
In Knives Out, Rian Johnson has crafted a clever, entertaining riff of the star-studded whodunnits of yore and he’s added a subversive dose of political commentary in order to spice things up a bit. That’s pretty well the one sentence hot-take on this movie and it’s pretty well where I land on the film. I’m not quite as fired up about the movie as a lot of people are, but I certainly wouldn’t say I’m chilly on it. It’s just . . . not quite as mind-blowingly fun as a lot of people are saying. I’m an Agatha Christie fan going way, way back, so I was all the way in on the set-up; I was also a little thrown when the movie, fairly quickly, segues neatly away from being an Agatha Christie riff by just flat out showing us the circumstances surrounding the central death of the film. I’ll take things briefly into spoilers in the next paragraph just for the fun of it, even though I’m not going to get super-spoilery even there.
What the film turns into is a riff on a different kind of murder mystery, the Columbo style tale where we, the audience, know the identity of the murderer and the entertainment value comes from watching an eccentric detective slowly tighten the net around the killer. But Knives Out has a subversive twist on this subgenre as well; the pleasure on Columbo was heightened because we were typically watching an arrogant, condescending rich guy get caught by a working class detective. You were always waiting for the moment when that condescending smirk got wiped off the killer’s face by the guy he thought was an idiot. In Knives Out, we’re watching a condescending, arrogant rich guy slowly tighten the net on a working class culprit who is, in the larger scheme of society, herself a victim, and so, even as we love Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in spite of his arrogance, we want to see him fail, we want to see the “killer” get away it. Johnson essentially flips the class dynamic of Columbo and thereby also flips the dramatic tension. Now when I say that I don’t think Knives Out is quite as smart as everyone seems to think it is, understand me: that’s still really smart and fun.
The movie has a great ensemble that it really ultimately asks very little of, comparative to what they’re capable of. Of course, that’s always kind of been the thing about these large ensemble mysteries, all the way back to the star-studded Poirot films with Albert Finney and up to the . . . well, the Poirot films with Kenneth Branagh. But, look, not every movie is Hereditary or Nocturnal Animals; give Toni Collette & Michael Shannon a chance to just have some fun. That’s just fine. Everyone in it is good, not great, but whatever. Jaeden Martell, nee Leiberher if you’re keeping track of this fine young actor, is probably the most wasted and his entire character is an oddity; in this climate, I don’t know why you put a character that’s an alt-right troll in your movie and then just never reference it. Don Johnson, of all people, kind of gave the standout performance for me; everyone in this movie blusters a lot, but Johnson’s the one who lets us see the fear behind the bluster. When I say the movie isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, I guess I’m saying that the final twist isn’t that much of a shock, nor have the clues been hidden quite as cleverly as Johnson thinks, though I will confess that there is one element of that twist ending that neatly filled something I had kind of rolled my eyes at earlier, thinking it was a plot hole, so that was a carefully seeded bit of business. But then, as I said, I cut my teeth on Agatha Christie, so maybe I’m more attuned to this kind of thing than others are; I just know I was expecting something a little more unexpected. But still, this is a downright fun movie for sure; I have the same reservations about it that I seem to have about every Johnson movie. He’s a director that’s somewhat problematic for me in terms of the writing, I guess. I’ve walked out of every Johnson movie I’ve ever seen wishing it was just a smidge better, but still having had a good time. And it’s heartening to see a movie like this doing well with a larger audience. I hope the studios take the right lesson from this year; after Joker and Knives Out (and maybe even the relatively large, if still small, success of Parasite), I think it’s about time they figured out that mainstream audiences are down for more idiosyncratic films than the studios seem to think. Now there’s a twist. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – subversive mystery is a lot of fun with a smart script and a game cast; less mindblowing and clever than it thinks, but still a damn good time at the movies. 3 ½ stars.