Knives Out Review

"Knives Out" is a mystery film that has such an eccentric cast playing even more bizarre characters that you'd swear this is a comedy, if only the script had one more pass through the joke mill. Instead things here are played with a straight face, only when it isn't, and it often isn't, but the humor often falls flat. There are a handful of zingers, but maybe it isn't a comedy? Then again, why would the family keep calling one of the character's sons a "nazi?" Of course I don't find calling someone a "nazi" funny unless they sternly sell soup on a sitcom, so perhaps it isn't a comedy? I couldn't tell.

What I could tell is that all I could think of during my screening was the 1985 gem "Clue," and while walking out of the theater I wasn't thinking "golly, I didn't think they did it." Instead I kept thinking "... is "Clue" on Netflix?"

Movies like "Knives Out" are tough to review, because to describe the plot, you could easily reveal one thing too many, but here is the gist: wealthy novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead, throat slashed clean, by his housekeeper (Edi Patterson). His large family is interrogated again by the cops by the time the audience shows up, only this time under the eye of Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), famous PI who was anonymously hired to the case after the police show their eagerness to rule the death a suicide. The story is told predominantly in the shadows of Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan's nurse and dear friend, and one of few involved who isn't a legal relative.

But the film scrubs through each of the large, and often duplicitous secondary cast, all of which have obvious motives for eliminating their father (or grandfather, father-in-law, etc.), and they all glow with excitement at the chance to play their part almost overzealously, sometimes on the verge of overacting to the point of parody, only they don't have anything particularly exciting to say or do.

What does work is how the screenplay handles the big reveal, something keenly kept out of sights but makes so much sense once Blanc (James Blanc) details it. But so what? The dad's dead, and... that's it. There isn't much payoff once everything is all said and done, except that the right person is caught and the right person gets rich from inheritance; "Knives Out" works on the technical level of filmmaking, it just forgot to include anything interesting.