Who dunnit? Who cares...
It’s likeable and easy to watch, but by the end of this Agatha Christiestyle mystery you’ll be thinking...
Knives Out C ert:12A 2hrs 10mins ★★★
Somewhat improbably, this is a film that brings together two of the biggest film franchises in the film-making world. Star Wars, in the shape of Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed Stars Wars VIII: The Last Jedi and performs the same dual role here; and James Bond, with Daniel Craig taking time off from being 007 to play a Tennessee private detective and show off his Deep South US accent.
So let me say right from the start that what duly ensues is even odder on the big screen than it sounds on paper. We quickly discover we have landed, not on the Death Star, nor in another of Blofeld’s secret lairs, but in the sort of countryhouse murder-mystery Agatha Christie would have recognised in a strychnine poisoned heartbeat. And even she might have thought it was a bit OTT.
Harlan Thrombey, played here in several layers of inevitable flashback by Christopher Plummer, is dead: we know that almost from the start. We go on to learn that he’s been murdered – on the chaise longue in his study, with a dagger.
‘Heck, the guy practically lived on a Cluedo board,’ notes the young state trooper as he gazes in awe at the large Gothic pile that the extended and highly dysfunctional Thrombey family have hitherto called home.
It’s lines like this – together with discoveries such as Harlan being a writer of murder-mysteries himself, and that all the family members will be interviewed in front of a huge dagger sculpture – that provide the first clues as to the film’s rich, fruity and theatrically wordy tone.
A murder-mystery that even Agatha Christie might have thought a bit OTT
If Johnson’s last big success, the extraordinarily good Looper, was all about the cleverness of its outlandish central idea (a hitman being sent back in time to kill himself ), this occupies more familiar ground. It’s one part homage, one part pastiche, one part Poirot… only this time with that Deep South accent.
‘What is this?’ asks one of the many suspects, mocking detective Benoit Blanc’s lazily drawled vowels: ‘CSI: KFC?’ It’s one of the few laugh-out-loud moments in a film that, while always likeable and easy watching, is never quite as clever or as funny as it thinks.
Audiences here – maybe more than their US counterparts – are very, very familiar with this sort of highly mannered thing. Think Michael Caine in Sleuth and you’ll get rather more than the general Murder, She Wrote idea.
Craig, who last displayed his perfectly decent but always distracting southern accent skills in Steven Soderbergh’s not very funny 2017 crime caper Logan Lucky, plays Benoit, of course – a private detective of such renown that the local police are happy to play second fiddle, in much the same way as poor Inspector Japp trails in the wake of the great Poirot. The complication here is that Benoit doesn’t know who’s employed him.
Which brings us to the suspects, who, in time-honoured genre tradition, turn out to be virtually everyone, given the suggestions of furious jealousy, quiet blackmail, incipient poverty and straightforward greed that are soon flying around.
Could it be Harlan’s steely eldest daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), or her creepily lascivious husband (Don Johnson)? Or the son (Michael Shannon), who runs his father’s publishing company, or the widowed daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) with the school
fees to pay? Then there’s his nurse (Ana de Armas), housekeeper, assorted grandchildren… The list of who might have dunnit really does go on and on.
And eventually it goes on too far, with director Johnson tying himself up in convoluted plot twists and landing himself with an unhelpful running time of over two hours, and eventually plumping for an explanation that doesn’t ring true on at least two levels, maybe more.
Craig, not a natural light comedian, is decent enough, and the classy Shannon is always watchable too. But while Knives Out passes an evening gently amusingly, if you can still remember whodunnit – let alone care – by the time you get home, I’ll be very surprised.
Not one for ‘ze leetle grey cells’ after all.
IT’S A FACT Muppets co-creator Frank Oz (the voice of Miss Piggy and Yoda) features in Knives Out, his first role in 20 years that is not a voiceover.