I like to take my dad out to the movies when I get the chance. That doesn’t come very often. We don’t live close to each other, he’s a lot more selective than I am, and my brother gets him out to a lot of the things he wants to see anyway. But I do take him out when I can when I do visit the family, and quite frankly, the new Knives Out had an advantage: my mom also likes murder mysteries. Consequently, I got to take both of them out for once over a Thanksgiving visit.
And it turns out they both enjoyed the movie. Dad’s only complaint was it was a little slow, but he said 2017’s Logan didn’t have enough action, so I take some of his criticisms like that with a grain of salt.
Knives Out is writer/director Rian Johnson’s attempt to do an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery. To do that, there’s the basic set-up: wealthy mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (the magnificent Christopher Plummer) is found dead the day after his 85th birthday party. The only people in the house are his extended family, a group that includes ruthless daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Richard (Don Johnson), youngest son/Harlan’s publisher Walt (Michael Shannon), space cadet widowed daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette), and a couple grandkids (Katherine Langford and Jaeden Martell) who can’t really stand each other. One grandson, Ransom (Chris Evans, working really hard to avoid typecasting and doing a great job of it), had a loud fight with Harlan the night before and then stormed out. Harlan’s death looks like a suicide, but there is one little complication.
That complication comes in the form of private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, doing a really thick Southern accent for some reason). Someone hired him to look into Harlan’s death.
But then there wouldn’t be a murder mystery without some unexpected surprises. Most of everything I said up there is in the movie’s advertising. The first real surprise is who the main character is, and that would be Marta Cabera (Ana de Armas). She was Harlan’s nurse and companion, a young woman whose mother immigrated to America from some other country (one running gag is none of the Thrombey’s seem to know which one), and Marta looks to be the only member of Harlan’s extended family who is really sad to see the old man die. The more we see of the rest of the Thrombey family, the more we see each and every one of them is at best a shallow person and at worst something of a privileged monster.
Johnson uses this to really hammer home a subtext for the movie about the expectations of the wealthy and powerful, the ones used to getting their own way and making the rules work in their favor. Marta knows things about all of the others and old man Harlan, seen only in flashbacks. Plus, for reasons I won’t get into here, Blanc decides early on Marta is about the only suspect he trusts enough to get help from.
Knives Out has all the things a good murder mystery needs: a twisted plot, lots of suspects, a great cast, and firm direction that gives the audience the information it needs but doesn’t treat them like idiots either. Really, this was just an unexpected good time at the movies: not a sequel or remake, no huge special effects extravaganza, or anything, just a tightly told story about murder.
Grade: A
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