Knives Out had me with the directness of its setup: a fancy manse; a rich, dysfunctional family; and a shocking murder in need of a solution. In walks Detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig), a master crime-solver with a résumé as thick as his southern accent. “I suspect foul play … I have eliminated no suspects,” he intones when asked why he’s there. The writer and director Rian Johnson, who assembled this project quickly after spending years in the franchise-filmmaking trenches with The Last Jedi, initially seems to be seeking out simplicity—a traditional drawing-room whodunit right out of Agatha Christie’s library. But the fun really begins when Knives Out starts flouting its genre’s rules.
Knives Out is a self-aware, stylised farce that has a great time - and pulls you along with it. Full Review Original Score: 4.5/5 Alex Bentley CultureMap. Critics consensus Knives Out sharpens old murder-mystery tropes with a keenly assembled suspense outing that makes brilliant use of writer-director Rian Johnson's stellar ensemble. Knives Out directed by Rian Johnson is a modern-day whodunit which gives us glimpses into the bygone era of classic mystery movies. It also serves as a character study of the multiple characters in the plot. A sleek game of cat and mouse, “Knives Out” begins the hunt with a mysterious pool of blood and ends, well, telling wouldn’t be fair. The press screening that I attended was preceded by a brief.
That inventiveness shouldn’t be too surprising given Johnson’s career. Starting in 2005 with his breakout debut, Brick, a teenage noir homage, he’s been a filmmaker who draws from the classics but gives them sparkly new packages. Even The Last Jedi challenged the storytelling conventions of the long-winded Star Wars saga with humor and pique, rather than just reaffirming them (and stunned many a fan as a result). While Knives Out is a more straightforward proposition, a murder mystery that ties up every loose end, many of its best thrills come in the narrative hairpin turns Johnson makes along the way.
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The film keeps the crucial tropes of a Christie plot, namely ostentatious wealth, a cast of colorful characters with blaring personality disorders, and a cunning detective who lives only to crack the case before him. Yet it’s set in the present day, dispensing with the antiquated fortunes of Poirot’s usual suspects. Instead, Johnson conjures a coterie of modern, rich buffoons—all of them related to the successful crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who is found stabbed on the night of his 85th birthday.
Who could’ve done it? There’s Harlan’s daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collette), a self-styled lifestyle guru who dispenses quack medical advice that even Gwyneth Paltrow would wrinkle her nose at. His daughter, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), is a real-estate mogul who constantly brags about being “self-made” despite receiving her father’s support. Harlan’s son, Walter (Michael Shannon), runs his dad’s publishing company, where his entire job seems to consist of printing and selling his father’s latest masterpiece. Even the grandkids, who include the handsome-jerk playboy Ransom (Chris Evans) and the taciturn alt-right-troll teenager Jacob (Jaeden Martell), are curdled in their own ways. Amid all the chaos and bickering, Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s live-in nurse, gets patronizing head pats from the rest of the family but is otherwise largely ignored.
Detective Blanc is ostensibly the film’s hero and serves as the audience’s surrogate, interrogating family members and sniffing around for clues. But Marta is the heart of the movie—a character who might easily be dismissed as a stock supporting role, but whom Johnson plants in the foreground. There’s no subtlety to Johnson’s message: The film champions a hardworking daughter of immigrants in a film about upper-class snobs scrambling to secure their inherited wealth. This is 2019, and one of the villains is a pale teen boy who posts offensive invective on Twitter.
But the detective genre has never been subtle. It’s a world where the investigator is intelligence personified and the suspects (as well as the viewers) are his captive audience, waiting for the answers to be revealed after two hours of careful deduction. Through Marta and Detective Blanc, who become impromptu partners in search of the truth, Johnson is telling a story about what justice might look like in America today—while also having plenty of fun.
The film’s advertising has obscured almost every detail of the plot besides the absolute basics, a difficult achievement today. So I’ll say only that while Knives Out is a whodunit with a twist ending, it’s just as concerned with why and how the murder was done as it is with the killer’s identity; the seemingly huge pieces of information dropped early on turn out to be small pieces of the puzzle. The art of a cinematic murder mystery is to make the act of putting clues together seem suspenseful and worth watching. In the hands of Craig at his most gleeful, de Armas at her career best, and Johnson oozing love for the genre, Knives Out rises splendidly to the task.
Review Of The Movie Knives Out Movie
A Blast From the Past in a Modern Day Oeuvre
Knives Out directed by Rian Johnson is a modern-day whodunit which gives us glimpses into the bygone era of classic mystery movies. It also serves as a character study of the multiple characters in the plot. Knives Out can best be described as a mixture of all elements of Agatha Christie novels and Alfred Hitchcock movies, but rest assured, this is one movie, a mystery-movie fan will not want to miss for anything!
The movie starts with a background of dogs barking, and then cuts on to a woman carrying breakfast to the master of the house (Harlan Thrombey, played by Christopher Plummer) only to find him lying on his sofa with his throat slit. It is shown that Harlan had organized his 85th birthday party the previous night, and his entire family had been invited along with the housekeeper Fran as well as Harlan’s nurse/caretaker/friend – Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the chief protagonist of this ensemble movie.
Harlan’s family includes his eldest daughter Linda (the ever bankable Jamie Lee Curtis), her husband Richard, Joni – the widow of Harlan’s deceased son Neil, Jodi’s daughter Meg, Harlan’s youngest son Walter “Walt” Thrombey, Walter’s wife Donna and son Jacob, and Harlan’s grandson Hugh “Ransom” who is Linda and Richard’s son (a brilliant Chris Evans).
It turns out that an anonymous individual hires private investigator Benoit Blanc (a refreshing Daniel Craig) to investigate the death of Harlan Thrombey. During the course of the movie, we learn the secrets that each family member has kept from the rest. We are also shown the conversations Harlan has had with his children and grandson during the party. Director Rian Johnson takes us through the journey engaging us to join in the party and find out the real killer. The plot moves at a decent pace when secrets of each family member start popping out, and you are spoilt for choice as to your pick of the culprit, they provide a snaky group of suspects. One of the undertones of the movie is a gradually developing rapport between Benoit and Marta, which lingers between friendly and suspicion.
Johnson’s script does not give you any “oh my god” twists, but it definitely keeps you engrossed in the proceedings. At the bottom of the script is a classic Agatha Christie plot, with Harlan’s mansion as the center piece, the characters forming the puzzle, and Benoit as Johnson’s Poirot. Rian Johnson’s direction is subtle and intelligent which is enhanced by a distinctive gallery of characters, given weight by Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas.
Craig delivers his dialogues in a unique fashion that is very unlike Craig, and is one of the highlights of the movie, and his performance is equally exhilarating. Michael Plummer brings the dead Harlan Thrombey to life with his presence. Jamie Lee Curtis, as always, does what she does best – give a strong performance. Toni Collette as Joni Thrombey makes each scene count with her take on the character. Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, and Katherine Langford are adequate in their parts. It’s very difficult to despise Chris Evans, but here he does manage to bring out that feeling with his short but impactful performance. Knives out, however, belongs mainly to 2 individuals – Ana de Armas and director Rian Johnson. Ms. Armas is brilliant in her portrayal of Marta Cabrera, and brings to the table a certain honesty in her acting which will linger in the minds of the audience for a long long time. Rian Johnson will catch most of the audience off guard by creating an extremely thrilling crime drama, that uses the collective skills of its excellent cast to great effect.
‘Knives Out’ makes a strong case as one of the best films of the year and a definitive murder mystery for the ages. If murder could be this fun, who wouldn’t be asking for more?
Review Of The Movie Knives Out Netflix
Rating: 4 stars.