Review: KNIVES OUT

Celebrated whodunnit novelist Harlan Thrombey is discovered dead in his study the morning after a party for his family. All of them have benefitted from the patriarch's position and wealth and all are about to reveal that they had a motive for doing him in. Not only is this like the plot of one of his novels but the police investigation includes a private detective in the form of a southern savant Benoit Blanc who also seems cut from the pages of a Thrombey book. So, rich family, a mass of motives and opportunity and a cluey sleuth on the case: who did dun it?

Well, that is the point but every whodunnit worth its salt offers scope for social commentary, satire and even just some old fashioned morality mining. That's what this one does and, a smattering of moderne narrative compression techniques, makes for a very entertaining couple of hours. End of story? Not quite.

There is an engaging fluidity here that lets the film move between arch and basely funny moments and more genuine thrills. It's hard to pin it down as a thriller or a comedy. The problem here, for me, is that this approach has encouraged a lot of belt-loosening in the screenplay and final edit. What feels like a constant thread of narrative is more like a meandering tour of the film's cleverness. While performances are never pushed to parody and the flashbacks in characters' recollections are more efficient (especially when the account is at odds with the memory) we are neither victims of self-conscious artistry nor routine genre service. Knives Out is a whodunnit for today but did we need it? I was left wondering if the bash-it-out approach of Ready or Not might not serve both its times and audiences better (also, it's shorter and funnier).

That said we do have some engaging performances. Daniel Craig is having a ball with his hand-rolled southern drawl and classic sleuth persona. His counterpart Ana de Armas owns the screen as the hapless accused from the illegal end of the immigrant family spectrum (and as cheap as the joke is the fact that every uppercrust Thrombey thinks she comes from a different part of Latin America it is a funny one). Michael Shannon, normally a go to galeforce presence clearly engages with the controlled rage of his family loser character. Christopher Plummer does what he says on his tin. Chris Evans is funny and edgy as the loose canon grandson Ransom. However, Toni Collette and Jamie Lee Curtis seem underwritten. Speaking of that, why bother casting the wonder LaKeith Stanfield in a role that makes absolutely nothing of him? Had the filmmakers not seen Atlanta, Get Out or Sorry to Bother You? As soon as you see him you think extra-dimension but what you get is 1st Detective. Such a waste.

At over two hours Knives Out ends up feeling hollower than it should. So what, aren't whodunnits fun piffly puzzles? Well, no. As they generically play out among the higher echelons the motives for the murders they depict are themselves a mix of the base passions of anger or jealousy etc. and troubling deeper moral currents. Super sleuths philosophise and comment. I don't know that I care so much about the reflexive architecture of a whodunnit about a master of whodunnits in a house that one character describes as looking like a Cluedo board. It's tidy, perhaps too much so. It's clever but perhaps not enough.