Yes, for anyone else wondering about the tone: This is definitely closer to Murder on the Orient Express, and far from something like Murder By Death. There is some black humor throughout (because of the subject matter, natch), but it’s not, for example, racist-Asian-stereotype humor.
Im with you @Tman that was the only thing that I objected to.
Otherwise how much fun was this. Cast was awesome. Chris Evans always in turtle necks or similar to hide the buffness I was very amused with.
Finally saw this over the weekend. Excellent cast doing some fine acting combined with a quirky but well written script and some fantastic set design (especially that house!) made for a great movie of a kind you don’t see very often anymore. I
I enjoyed Craig’s character the most once he warmed up a bit, but honestly everyone was great in this. Ana de Armas is absolutely adorable as Marta, you just want to hug her throughout the film. She carries the movie effortlessly as you go through a range of emotions with her and yet still laugh at so many of her scenes as she tries to get herself out of her situation. The car chase in particular was hilarious.
If you don’t get a chance to catch this in theaters, I would highly recommend it when it hits streaming. The trailers don’t do it justice, it’s 2+ hours of murder-mystery mixed with dark comedy that feels like it goes by in less than an hour, it’s that good.
I just caught it and I’d like to thank you for having the foresight to write my review before I saw the movie. Such a delight to watch.
Ha! Great minds and all that. Glad you enjoyed it as well!
Just caught this today and absolutely loved it. Laughed out loud so many times.
What do you guys think of the give-away in the 1H of the movie? I thought it was a little heavy-handed, a little too obvious, and spoiled some of the fun of the 2H for me.
I’ve heard (maybe in the Qt3 podcast) that Johnson didn’t want to make an actual murder mystery, but wanted it to be more about the tension of whether a good person who is responsible will get caught.
Honestly, while watching I kept expecting that it would turn out that the whole thing was arranged by Christopher Plummer (still alive) to manipulate or condemn his children, forgetting that there was a funeral that presumably didn’t have an empty casket.
1H = first half? I didn’t mind it because I figured there would be more shoes to drop, sometimes with spots of blood on them. I also thought there might be an unreliable narrator that meant that it couldn’t be trusted.
The reason I didn’t trust Marta through most of the movie was threefold. First, okay, my bad, but when they showed the picture of the woman that Don Johnson was cheating on his wife with, I thought that was Marta. Chalk that up to face blindness or something. Second, the family members said she was from Ecuador, Paraguay, at least two other Central or South American countries. I wasn’t sure if that was attributed to the family’s general obliviousness and privilege, or if she was a charlatan and fraudster herself. Finally the “If False=Vomit” trait was far-fetched enough that I thought she made it up for her benefit.
So that’s why I didn’t mind that they revealed Whodunnit early on. I was pleased that the character of Marta was as dependable and honest as she seemed at first blush. And there were still enough twists and great performances to keep me from checking my watch.
Nice:
Lionsgate hasn’t officially greenlit anything yet mind, but with a 250 million gross on a 40 million budget, I can’t imagine they’d be reluctant to make a sequel.
Huh. Seems a (creative) mistake to centre it on Craig, though presumably it makes it more commercial. His character wasn’t particularly interesting (and it would be hard to keep it from becoming even more of a self parody if spun out into sequels). He was fun as a foil to Marta, but nothing more.
I still don’t understand how Rian Johnson could write good solid scripts like Looper, Brick and Knives Out and in between write confusing, sloppy garbage like the Last Jedi with plot holes galore. Maybe it was not his fault, but Disney messing with the production of TLJ
Maybe too much baggage?
The problem is that Moira’s story seems over. Craig’s character is the world-famous detective. It makes sense he’ll move on to a new case, ala Poirot.
Sure, I get that, but they seem to be painting themselves into a corner. I’d argue they’d have been better off making it a much looser follow-up - more like Get Out --> Us.
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Benoit doesn’t have a schtick, really, other than his accent. I don’t really care what he does next and I’m not sure other people do either.
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Part of the appeal of things like Knives Out are the ensemble casts, which can be hard/expensive to assemble.
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It seems to face a choice between repeating the “gimmick” of Knives Out, which could feel lazy, or becoming more of a conventional whodunnit, which would feel boring (not to mention selling out the first film). These problems are amplified if they keep the detective as the main point of continuity.
Columbo used one gimmick for three decades.
But I guess it depends on what you consider to be the gimmick here.
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The Rashomon flashbacks?
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Revealing the murderer a third into the movie?
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Making the audience sympathize with both the murderer and the victim?
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Finishing by revealing that they didn’t actually do it?
They can probably do 1 without it feeling lazy. Doing 3 would require doing 2. Inverting 4 seems like the obvious twist if you do 2+3 again.
Columbo had a great schtick though <insert “talk softly and carry a big schtick” joke here>.
And the gimmick I was referring to was 2, though the others are kind of corollaries to it. Knives Out is doing the subvert-the-genre-while-ultimately-fulfilling-its-tropes thing. There are extreme diminishing returns to that sort of approach, as the slasher movie parodies showed.
Remember, TLJ is a sequel to The Force Awakens, which gave him next to nothing (narratively, at least) to work with. Personally I think it’s an amazing achievement under the circumstances. YMMV.
I saw this last night and it was amazing. Multiple laugh out loud moments. 9/10, would recommend.
That’s what RJ does. And he’s damn good at it. I expect him to look at the tropes, and subvert/fulfill them in completely different ways.