Movie Review: Knives Out (2019)

Oh, Rian Johnson. Love him or hate him, he's been a polarizing figure ever since the release of The Last Jedi. And, while I have no wish to get bogged down in a big long debate about the merits or lack thereof in his contribution to the Star Wars universe, I was both curious and cautious in equal measure to hear the news of his next big movie project: a murder mystery in the vein of the old Agatha Christie novels, with a gentleman detective, a great big house and a whole cast of potential suspects.

And what a cast that this movie had in it too! Even as I was unsure about the merits of the movie pre-release, I still had to hand it to Rian for the star power on display in this movie: Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, Christopher Plummer, and many more besides that. Dude knew how to pick the performers for his work, I'd give him that.

That being said though, I don't want to downplay the fact that, going into this movie with my mother and father, I was nervous. In fact, if anything, all the (non-spoiler) reviews I had read in advance of the movie just added to my caution: they spoke glowingly of the movie's craft, of how brilliant each and every twist was, and how each twist completely upended the whole story and made you rethink the entire movie...

Which made me worry a lot. You see, I'm not really much of a mystery person. I can admire a well-crafted mystery, but I freely admit that I am terrible at figuring them out for myself. That, and based on prior experiences with some mystery/detective-based stories (coughs-Sherlock-cough) I was pretty nervous about the idea of just *what* kind of plot twists I might be going into here.

So with all of that being said just now... imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch Knives Out and had a really great time from start to finish.

It's hard to describe a mystery without spoiling the big twist, so I'll just share with you all the setup of the story in terms of the plot:

The day after his eighty-fifth birthday, celebrated with his extended family, wealthy mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead in his study by an apparent suicide. His throat slit and the knife right in his hands, the police are quite ready to rule this an open-and-shut case. However, private investigator Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig, speaking with a, uh, rather stylized, Southern accent) believes that there is more to the matter than it would appear, in large part because he was hired by an anonymous party to investigate the very morning the news came out.

Blanc, alongside local police detective Lieutenant Elliot (Lakeith Stanfield) and State Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan) question the members of Harlan's family to try and determine anything suspicious about the night of the birthday party. By and by, it becomes clear that the stories told do not quite add up, and that there are quite a few members of the Thrombey family with a grudge to bear, or perhaps "an axe to grind" might be the better term...

And what about the staff of the house, in particular Harlan's nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas)?

Ultimately though, who is really the guilty party in this story? The answer might be obvious - or it might not.

Knives Out is a cleverly constructed movie. In fact, perhaps its greatest trick is how simplistic the "mystery" appears to be at first glance. In fact, a big question that the movie dangles before its audience is, perhaps, whether or not there really *is* a mystery to begin with; an honestly refreshing setup that, even when the truth ultimately comes out, still manages to feel fairly unique and not gratuitous.

That being said, the movie's greatest strength definitely lies in its use of character, and also of humor too. This is a movie with a very large cast, as beyond just Daniel Craig as the detective and Ana de Armas as the nurse, you have all the members of Harlan Thrombey's family: a list of names that includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Katherine Langford, and Jaeden Martell. (Frank Oz also gets a delightful cameo as Harlan's lawyer, by the way. He has some great material XD) And yet, despite the long list of characters, none of them feel truly superfluous or feel like props for the sake of moving the story along. You get a few moments with several of them, seeing various sides to their personalities, and they really feel like people - granted in the case of many of the Thrombeys, not *good* people by any stretch, but people all the same.

I mentioned humor in my previous paragraph. Knives Out is a movie with a sense of comedy. There is a lot of skillfully constructed humor to be found in this movie, one of the best examples being in a sequence early on where Lieutenant Elliot (with Blanc observing) interviews various members of Harlan's family about the night of the birthday, and various confrontations that were had with Harlan that night. The various answers are funny enough, due to being quite self-serving, but the cutaways to the truth (or on one occasion, to another character altogether) add their own laughs too. That's not to say though that the movie is a parody - rather, that it skillfully uses humor amidst a bunch of other moods. At different points Knives Out is humorous, suspenseful, and heartfelt, and it all works quite nicely without really jarring or feeling off-putting to the audience.

Knives Out is, I feel I must also add, a movie that has something to say, politically. It takes some pretty clear shots at the rich, as well as both sides of the right and the left (on the one end is that quite a few of the Thrombeys are conservative, anti-immigration, act with condescending politeness to Marta as a "good" example of immigrants, and the Thrombey kid played by Jaeden Martell is an alt-right shitposter - on the other hand though the liberal members of the family are scarcely much better, Toni Collette's character being quite vapid and greedy). Family is a key theme in the movie, but it's also strongly emphasized that family is *much* more than just bloodlines and the idea of heritage. It's present in the movie, but frankly done in such a skillful and stylish way, not being overbearing, that I had very little issue with this aspect of the movie.

There are a number of very strong performances to talk about in the movie, but for the sake of brevity I'll limit myself to three: Daniel Craig as gentleman detective Benoit Blanc, Ana de Armas as Marta Cabrera, and Chris Evans as estranged Thrombey scion Hugh Ransom Drysdale. Craig is a treat in a lot of ways due to his performance of Blanc as an almost comical figure; with his drawling Southern accent (memorably mocked at a few points by Ransom, "What is this, CSI: KFC?") and focus on the question of who hired him, you could almost think his reputation as "last of the gentleman detectives" is ironic more than anything else. But ultimately, Craig keeps the character from veering into parody, and Blanc is notable in the movie for his politeness and respect in dealing with Marta and several others. When the chips are down, he really does prove his credentials as a detective.

Ana de Armas gives a superbly understated but engaging performance. She is a major presence through a lot of the movie, and while another actress might have made the character grating or annoying (in particular due to an unfortunate quirk that poor Marta suffers from), she manages to anchor the movie with a very sympathetic and likable nature.

And then there's Chris Evans as Ransom. It's an incredibly memorable performance in a lot of ways, because you can tell that, after nearly a decade of playing Captain America in the MCU, the actor is clearly relishing the chance to play someone like Ransom - in other words, completely selfish, self-interested and a smooth-talking snake in the grass. From the very moment he arrives in the film, bringing a box of cookies to the reading of Harlan's will, and provoking a mass argument among his family which he watches with amusement, it's clear that Ransom is a jerk, knows it, and loves it. In fact, he's so good at it that he manages to actually be very darkly charming, perhaps even dangerously so... but all the same, there is a very sick fun to be had in seeing Chris "Steve Rogers" Evans point to the various Thrombeys and tell them "Eat shit!" over and over.

All in all, there's a lot to recommend about Knives Out. It's smart, it's stylish, with a clever sense of humor and some interesting thematic commentary at play, intertwined with its tribute to the classic murder mystery. Rian Johnson more than made up for any problems I had with The Last Jedi with this movie and I would happily recommend it to those with a fondness for mystery stories.

I would assuredly give this movie a rating of eight out of ten, for solid enjoyment and afterthought.