Knives Out (2019)
“…look around…the guy practically lives in a Clue board”
also…
“What were the words overheard by the Nazi child masturbatin' in the bathroom?”
We didn’t know how much we needed to see this movie.
Part Clue, part House of the Long Shadows, and all fun, Knives Out is an old school whodunit and a delight to watch.
We’re going to work hard to avoid Spoilers on this one and won’t get into the fine details of the story. We can say there is a lot to like in this movie.
The sets are a beautiful mash up of a 1970s Agatha Christie movie and an old Hammer Studios production, the script is clever, has some good turns, and is pretty funny, and the cast is first rate, including Christopher Plummer (Murder by Decree) as the family patriarch, gentlemen detective Benoit Blanc (an almost unrecognizable Daniel Craig), good girl nurse Ana de Armas (Blade Runner 2049), bad boy Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson (Watchmen), Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield (Atlanta) and many more.
One other thing we’ll note - and this is more an observation than a criticism - is that the movie flirts pretty hard with the idea of deconstructing the whole armchair detective genre. But while it certainly stretches it at times, Knives remains reliably loyal to the tradition of earlier films, like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. While some of the possible turns I imagined were interesting (at least to me), the actual conclusion fit like an old deerstalker hat.
Knives Out may not be the best film I’ve watch this year - but it is the one I have enjoyed the most. You can check it out HERE.
A Very Solid Four out of Five Donut Holes.
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Post Credit Bonus!
