Knives Out

Maybe my expectations were too high. I enjoyed Knives Out just fine--it's fun and clever, and the cast seems to be having a good time--but it surely not one of the best films of the year. During the film Daniel Craig, as the Holmesean detective, says there's a hole in the case, like a doughnut. Knives Out is also missing something. It's a doughnut of a film.

Rian Johnson returns to the genre mystery form--he got his start with a teenage version of a private eye film with Brick--and Knives Out is a tip of the hat to the kind of star-studded whodunits they used to make all the time (there's a clip of Murder, She Wrote, in Spanish no less, to remind us of that era).

Craig stars as an idiosyncratic private eye who is hired to investigate the suicide of a very popular mystery writer. His family all have motives. His nurse, Ana de Armas, is the least likely suspect, although she was the last to see him alive. What happened?

Interestingly, Knives Out answers that question about halfway through the movie, and the rest of the film is determining the answer to a different question. It is fairly convoluted but followable, but like many mysteries, Knives Out is less concerned with the solution than to the menagerie of characters that it presents. It also has something to say about the hot-button topic of immigration (instantly dating itself, the characters engage in an argument about Donald Trump).

The old mystery writer is Christopher Plummer, and he has a daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), a son-in-law (Don Johnson), a son (Michael Shannon), a daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and three grandchildren, the most notable being Chris Evans, who has been loafing on money Plummer has given him. During interview segments, we learn that most of them had some sort of blow up the night of Plummer's death, which also happened to be his 85th birthday party.

Rian Johnson shows his affection for works by Agatha Christie and the like, as almost all of the film is characters explaining what happened. We do see some flashbacks, but at times there was just too much exposition. Craig adopts an accent that one character likens to Foghorn Leghorn, and while he is supposed to be world-famous, he does miss some obvious things.

A few quibbles aside, Knives Out is a pleasure. I was hooked with the opening shot of the family mansion (the real house is located outside of Boston), with two dogs running across the yard. A will reading, a real old-fashioned touch, is a great scene (with Frank Oz, without puppets, playing the lawyer). The acting is all fine, and the reverses timed well. It just didn't knock me over, and probably would have a movie I could have waited to see on home video.