Knives Out ** (2019 Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Christopher Plummer) – Movie Review

Sorry, it’s Knives Out here.

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s Agatha Christie spoof Knives Out is long (130 minutes), slow, draggy, stale and not much fun at all.

The performances are uniformly arch and overstated. Daniel Craig is wearisome as the detective Benoit Blanc investigating the death of renowned crime novelist patriarch Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) at an old mansion. It is a comedy, yes, though there is a hint that Johnson is taking his crime mystery seriously. Yet its solution is very obvious, doing no justice to Agatha Christie’s ingenious plots. Benoit Blanc uses his leetel grey cells to interrogate the various surviving members of the eccentric, combative family. Pardon nous, Benoit, but we are way ahead of you.

Unfortunately this does not allow the lovely cast to shine: Chris Evans, Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Katherine Langford and Jaeden Martell are all lost and wasted, with too little to do and drossy dialogue to try to make fly. Ana de Armas, on the other hand, is given way too much to do as Harlan Thrombey’s home helper Marta Cabrera, though she is okay at it.

Where are the scintillating wit and the brilliant one liners? Neil Simon did this loads better decades ago in Murder by Death (1976) and it isn’t nearly as funny as Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express.

To be fair, Rian Johnson directed the fascinating Brick, The Brothers Bloom and Looper, but also Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017).

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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