Film Review: ‘Knives Out’ is an Enjoyable Romp

Knives Out, written and directed by Rian Johnson. Produced by Lionsgate. Copyright 2019. (Seen December 10, 2019.)

Knives Out is one of those celebrity-filled murder mystery movies you used to get quite a bit in the sixties through the eighties but haven’t really seen much recently. There was an attempt with Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express in 2017, but really not since Clue has there been something quite like this.

The plot is your basic murder mystery: Christopher Plummer plays Harlan Thrombey, a murder mystery writer patriarch of a wealthy family with all sorts of soap opera drama going on, from affairs to stealing from the company. He dies by apparent suicide, but then Benoit Blanc (played up to eleven by Daniel Craig) is brought in, a famous private investigator, hired by an unknown patron to, well, investigate.

The entire cast — from Don Johnson to Jamie Lee Curtis to Toni Collette — has so. much. fun. with their parts and are obviously having a field day making it. And that’s the reason Knives Out works.

Craig is probably the best example, swimming in a thick southern accent and a body that’s little heavier than you see when he’s Bond. And he should be nominated for an award for the donut hole speech alone. But runner up is definitely Chris Evans, who delights in playing an asshole douche canoe through and through. This is more Evans from What’s Your Number? and Not Another Teen Movie, not Captain America, and he is so very pretty on camera.

Toni Collette plays a Gwyneth Paltrow expy — Goop-esque business and all — and is delightfully weird. Jamie Lee Curtis is vastly underused, but does the best with what she has. But of course, as Pop Culture Happy Hour’s segment on the movie notes, the real discovery is in relative newcomer Ana de Armas, who plays Harlan’s nurse and manages to hold her own against all this glorious talent.

I don’t know if it was the lousy audience (from the dudes behind us that we suspect snuck in that talked pretty much through the whole thing, to the parent and her two kids — oldest looking maybe 5 or 6? — who fidgeted and played with their phones until about halfway through when they left), the near 20 minutes worth of ads and trailers prior to the movie actually starting, or that my expectations were too high, but while I enjoyed Knives Out, it wasn’t the type of movie that made me want to tell everyone I knew to go see it.

Writer/director Rian Johnson knows what he’s doing, though, and there are so many homages and Easter eggs to other such films, from a reference to the house being like a Clue board to characters watching an episode of Murder She Wrote.

The mystery of ‘whodunit’ itself is pretty weak, and is revealed pretty early on in the movie (although the mystery of who hired Blanc is kept for the end reveal), but as I joked on social media, I was a fan of Sherlock: I’m used to weak mysteries.

But it’s an enjoyable enough film, filled with great comedic moments and great acting. This is the kind of film where you get the feeling that the cast would’ve done it for free, if given the chance. And that goes a long way to making this an enjoyable romp. Find out more about the film on the official website.