Movie Review: "Knives Out"

"Knives Out": A.  If you are a devotee of Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes or the game Clue, the film Knives Out is for you.  As a fan of all three, I loved this movie.  Save for one quibble, it might be the best one I have seen this year.  As a bonus, mix in a brilliantly curated set of songs, a Barney Fifesque police detective, and an ensemble cast comprised of familiar and new faces delivering a blend of humor and sophistication.  As is true with almost any Christie or Holmes mystery, there are foreshadowings, red herrings, clues, disguises, thumps in the dark, creaky staircases and lethal weapons galore, as the title suggests.  The old mansion where much of the action takes place is almost a character in and of itself.   The result of all this is a delight that you may just have to see twice to make sure you didn't miss anything.

The patriarch of the Thrombey family is Harlan (the inestimable Christopher Plummer), who has made his multi-million dollar fortune writing crime novels.  Harlan is no doddering fool; in fact, just the opposite.  Most importantly, he uncannily knows what's going on behind his back.  He has invited his two married children, their spouses and his widowed daughter-in-law to his estate to celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday.  Also present for the festivities are his mother, his two grandchildren, his omni-present personal nurse and the housekeeper.  Before the evening is over, Harlan turns up dead.

It looks like a suicide, but wait.  The body is practically still warm when Dectective Benoit Blanc (former James Bond actor Daniel Craig) and his unintentionally goofy assistant Wagner (Noah Segan) arrive.  Who hired them?  No one seems to know. Pretty soon Blanc has a crime scene on his hands.  At first he stays in the background, making mental notes on each of the guests who attended the party.  We learn that, if truth be told, a majority of them were selfishly waiting for Harlan to pass, thus opening the door to their respective cuts of his estate.  Some held more solid motives to cause Harlan's demise, all of which come to light during a flashback of the birthday party.

Harlan had caught on to an embezzlement scheme orchestrated by widowed daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collett), whereby she had been "double-dipping" from the funds he'd provided to pay for her daughter Meg's (Katherine Langford) college education.  Harlan fired his youngest offspring, Walt (Michael Shannon), from his position of operating the publishing side of Harlan's works.  Perhaps Walt's habit of referring to his father's works as "our books" was too much for the old man.  Although oldest child Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) is sharp and astute -- she had insisted that her husband Richard (Don Johnson) sign a prenup -- she was unaware that Richard and Harlan's young nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), were having an affair.  Harlan, however, was aware, and threatened to expose Richard's infidelity.  Also during the party, Harlan rebukes his ne'er-do-well adult grandson, Hugh (Chris Evans), for his laziness and terrible attitude, informing the young man that he is now cut off from the will's inheritance.  Thus, there is no shortage of suspects or motives.

In addition to the party flashback, we also witness several re-enactments (via flashback) of Harlan's last moments and the events immediately preceding them.  Three possibilities exist: suicide, accidental death, or cold-blooded murder.  The story does not end when we think it will end.  Toward the end of Christie's Murder On The Orient Express, Detective Hercule Poirot explains to the astonishment of the passengers how he solved the crime.  In similar fashion, many Sherlock Holmes stories wrap up when the master detective, Holmes, pieces together the clues for the benefit of his bewildered colleague, Dr. Watson.  In Knives Out we have Detective Blanc doing much the same.  The majority of his conclusions make sense, but for several of his suppositions we wonder, "How in the world did he figure that out?"  It's all great fun, except for the dearly departed Harlan Thrombey.

Writer-director Ryan Johnson adds splashes of humor and various oddities to keep things light.  Marta the nurse vomits when she lies, an idiosyncrasy which can and does work both for and against her. When various characters refer to her, they do so by naming the South American country from which they think she immigrated: “the Brazilian nurse,” “the Peruvian nurse,” “the nurse from Paraguay,” etc.  This works not as knee-slapping humor but as kind of a subtle inside joke for the viewers. One character refers to the detectives as “CSI: KFC.”  The nearly catatonic grandmother, Great Nana Thrombey (K Callan), is accused of eating all the salmon spread before dinner. The jaunty tunes which often accompany the scene shifting complement the mostly campy atmosphere.  Who ever knew a murder investigation could be anything but drama?

The reading of Harlan’s will in the mansion’s library by family attorney Alan Stevens (Frank Oz), with all members present, is a highlight which comes with a surprise. But it is followed by a restaurant scene where two key characters have a game-changing conversation during which certain admissions are made. That conversation requires the viewers to overlook a credibility gap, because the two characters have had no direct dialogue between themselves, and the admissions seem to be rendered too casually given what's at stake.  That gap temporarily had me lowering my grade to an A-, but the more I thought about the level of entertainment provided by the film as a whole, I decided to stick with my original assessment, A.