Mystery abounds in brilliantly fun Knives Out

Daniel Craig, LaKeith Stanfield, and Noah Segan in Knives Out. Image courtesy Lions Gate.

At the center of Knives Out is a murder most foul. Legendary mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is discovered dead by his nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) the morning after his birthday party. The suspects are Harlan's flesh and blood. Could it have been his daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), or her husband Richard (Don Johnson), or his son Ransom (Chris Evans)? Was it Walt (Michael Shannon), or his wife Donna (Riki Lindhome), or his son Jacob (Jaeden Martell)? Or maybe it was his daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) or granddaughter Meg (Katherine Langford)? Everyone has a motive and opportunity, and it's up to private eye Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, sporting a brilliantly absurd southern accent), Lieutenant Elliot (LaKeith Stanfield), and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan) to determine what caused Harlan Thrombey's demise.

Saying too much more would ruin the fun writer/director Rian Johnson has with Knives Out. This movie is a blast from start to end, zigging and zagging and zigging again from one deliriously clever twist to the next. Johnson weaves his tale tightly, providing the audience nearly exactly the amount of information to make the final big swerve ending nearly perfect. This is an incredibly difficult trick to pull off in a genre notorious for hiding vital information from the viewer just for the sake of maintaining the mystery. That isn't Johnson's style though. Rather, he employs storytelling and filmmaking sleights of hand to retain a scintilla of ambiguity, just enough to keep the audience from knowing for sure what led to Harlan Thrombey's demise. You could watch Knives Out for days on end to find the little Easter eggs and hints Johnson throws in to throw viewers off. He borrows liberally from films like Rashomon and The Maltese Falcon as little tricks, playing on audience expectations from years of precedent, only to upend the expectations early on because it's far more fun to play with a genre than adhere to the rules strictly.

Johnson fortunately carries over the mystery genre tradition of the terribly wealthy family being terrible. The characters (and cast by extension) in Knives Out are an absolute hoot, dropping bon mots and retorts with the perfect amount of spite and malice. They are designed to be perfectly detestable, wrapped up in their world of wealth yet trying ever so hard to think they've earned anything despite starting at third base. It is so, so much fun watching these folks squirm during Benoit Blanc's interrogations or realize everything they'd planned for in life has gone to pot. The Thrombeys deserve the worst, and yet there is something sad about the entire affair. The film depicts a family that long ago gave up on ever actually liking one another, effectively waiting for their patriarch to die to inherit their slice of Harlan Thrombey's millions. Johnson's sense of humor doesn't completely cover the sadness of that scenario; avarice tore the Thrombey family asunder and nothing can ever repair that lost connection. Harlan Thrombey's legacy is a family with motive to murder him, which is both tragic and apropos for a genre dedicated to greed.

It is easy to read the tragedy in Knives Out, but Johnson and company are far, far more interested in putting on one helluva show than reflect on the sadness of being. This is one of the most purely fun films to come out this year, balancing entertainment with a fun little mental puzzle to keep viewers enthralled and engaged in the action on screen. Almost everything works about this film – from the writing and directing to the casting and right into the spacing, lighting, and even costumes. Every little thing in this movie means something, every frayed thread on a sweater or confused memory leads to something big and interesting. Knives Out is a piece of exquisite filmmaking that never fails to entertain its viewers, which is about as high of praise as a film can get.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 130 minutes

Genre: Crime

tl;dr

What Worked: Script, Acting, Daniel Craig's accent

What Fell Short: One reveal is a little too obvious

What To Watch As Well: Brick, Murder on the Orient Express

Inconsistent Halloween saves its best for last

Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The redeeming factor for the wildly inconsistent Halloween sequel is the ferocity of its female lead. Laurie Strode was a fighter in the first film, trading blows and stabs with a monster. The new film makes it clear that Halloween night 40 years ago haunts her now as it did then, but the extra years have done nothing to temper Laurie Strode's tenacity. Without her resolve and strength, Halloween circa 2018 would be little more than high-budget fan fiction.

Eliding over the events from movies two, four, five, six, seven, and eight, Halloween opens with a pair of podcasters (Rhian Rees and Jefferson Hall) revisiting the horror in Haddonfield 40 years on. After failing to get a word from Michael Myers (played by both original actor Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney), they visit Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) who is still scarred from that night. She lives alone in the woods, alienated from her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) and preparing for another encounter with Myers. Myers, meanwhile, is being transferred to a new mental health facility, much to the protestation of his psychiatrist Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer). For the second time in 40 years, something goes awry and Myers is loose again in Haddonfield, pursued by Strode, Sartain, and the weary Officer Hawkins (Will Patton). 

 

For much of Halloween, the question that drives much of the action is the why behind Michael Myers' wanton murder. Like the first movie, this Halloween offers little to no explanation (although much conjecture) for why the monster is a monster, which is for the best. Once the first set of sequels tried to connect Myers to a strained motivation it soured the character, and a monster without any apparent reason is far more horrifying than one with familial problems. But this movie goes too far into the other direction, painting Myers as more of a shark than a boogeyman. The scenario becomes predictable midway through the movie; Myers enters the house, murders the occupant (usually a woman) by surprise, then walks out to find his next victim. It's designed to be somewhat comedic, especially in the manner Myers so quickly dispatches of his victims, but it paints Myers as mindless instead of calculating. There's no intelligence or cleverness to his actions, and it removes much of Myers' mystique. Even if the audience never knew exactly why he picked Laurie and her friends, there was an intent somewhere that was pretty horrifying to think about. 

 

Halloween sheds the elegance and nuance of its predecessor and wraps itself instead in a bothersome coat of bluntness. Director David Gordon Green takes the basics of the original and ramps up the murders, showing as much gore and blood as he can. Green occasionally shows his horror chops on a few kills – highlighted by a rather effective sequence involving motion-detecting lights – but the murders become less and less intricate and the gore becomes greater and greater to compensate for the lack of imagination in the framing. The body count in Halloween is high enough to cause the shock factor wears off and the movie drags to get to the highly anticipated final showdown.

The path to the finale is pretty rough. Green and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley ended up with a rather funky script that doesn't meld the horror, comedy, and meta-comedy particularly well. It's tough to tell exactly what Halloween is designed to be, especially in the sequences that exist solely because of horror clichés. An argument could be made for parody, but there isn't enough of it in the rest of the film to consider these as much more than storytelling laziness. And the character motivations are all over the map, with folks changing who they are just to carry the movie forward. Dr. Sartain in particular has a strange, unconvincing arc that does more to connect Laurie and Myers than establish him as a character. 

 

Ultimately that showdown between Laurie and Myers is all that matters for Halloween. Green treats the rest of the mayhem caused by Myers as a means to an end, steps for the film to reconnect these two after four decades apart. The battle between Myers and the Strode women is fraught with intensity and fright, a mother fighting against a monster to save her daughter and granddaughter. Curtis is great in this sequence, resurrecting the ferocity that defined Laurie Strode 40 years ago while adding decades of pent-up rage to her battle against Myers. Laurie is fighting as a mother, a victim, a warrior, and a survivor, putting everything she has against Myers and then some to end 40 years of bad dreams and misery. The showdown isn't perfect – Green can't help but through a couple of unnecessary references in that throw off the pacing – but it's still a helluva ride and about as good of an ending as this movie could have.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 106 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Scares, Jamie Lee Curtis, final showdown

What Fell Short: Character motivations, too many in jokes

What To Watch As Well: Halloween