Knives Out (T-Street, Media Rights Capital [MRC], Lionsgate, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Sunday, April 30), after my husband Charles and I watched the overwhelming masterpiece Malcolm X (1992), directed by Spike Lee, written by him and Arnold Perl, and starring Denzel Washington in an incandescent performance as Malcolm X, I had originally planned to run the Blu-Ray I just got of the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Unfortunately, I found Malcolm X so utterly amazing and mind-blowing I decided that I wanted to show something lighter, so I put on a DVD of one of the two other films I had bought early Saturday afternoon at the Mission Hills Vons: Knives Out. This bizarre and much-ballyhooed comedy-mystery from 2019 had caught my attention recently with the release of a sequel, Glass Onion: A “Knives Out” Mystery, in December 2022. I picked it up partly because of the promotion surrounding the sequel and partly because it was written and directed by Rian Johnson, one of my favorite current filmmakers mainly due to the brilliance of his first feature, Brick (2005). I’ve seen two of Johnson’s later films, Looper (2012) and Star Wars, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), and while I was more than a little disappointed in Looper I liked Johnson’s “take” on the Star Wars universe and was stunned when J. J. Abrams, the talented but uneven filmmaker who got control of both the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, fired Johnson and himself took over the direction of the last film in the sequential Star Wars cycle, Star Wars, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Charles and I had both expected Knives Out to be another Murder by Death, Neil Simon’s uneven but (at its best) screamingly funny 1976 send-up of murder mysteries in general and old-dark-house murder mysteries in particular.

Alas, we were both sorely disappointed: Knives Out turned out to be one of the dullest so-called “thrillers” ever made, a ponderous bore that all too faithfully followed Agatha Christie’s formula: cardboard characters, preposterous situations, mind-numbing dialogue and a tangle of motives. Knives Out takes place almost entirely in the crumbling old manse of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher “Captain Von Trapp” Plummer, whose performance has an air of move-over-kids-and-let-the-old-man-show-you-how-it’s-done about it). He’s just been found with his throat slit by his young, faithful caregiver, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the only likable character in the whole movie. Marta’s mother is an undocumented immigrant from Uruguay and Marta is understandably worried that her involvement in a murder, even though totally innocent, will get mom and the whole family deported. (Donald Trump was still President when this movie was made, and it definitely reflects the Trump Zeitgeist.) Most of the other characters are Harlan’s relatives, either by blood or marriage, and they’re all part of his business empire and therefore dependent on him for their economic survival. Among them are his daughter, Linda Thrombey Drysdale (Jamie Lee Curtis, whose success in the original Hallowe’en definitely derailed her career even as it made her a ton of money); her husband Richard (Don Johnson); their son [Hugh] Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans); Harlan’s son Walt (Michael Shannon), who’s pleaded in vain with Harlan to allow his books to be made into movies or TV shows (when J. D. Salinger famously refused to sell the film rights to his books, at least he had a logical reason – the one time he had allowed a story of his to be sold to a studio, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” Sam Goldwyn had made a hash of it and turned it into a financially successful but artistically dreadful piece of shit called My Foolish Heart; given that Harlan Thrombey is a commercial genre writer it’s never made clear, and Rian Johnson couldn’t care less about, why he’s so adamant that none of his works be filmed); and various other Thrombeys including Joni (indie queen Toni Collette), Meg (Katherine Langford), Jacob (Jaeden Martell) – a 16-year-old neo-Nazi – Donna (Riki Lindholme) and an ancient woman named Greatnana Wanetta (K Callan).

Greatnana is actually supposed to be Harlan’s mother even though Harlan has just finished celebrating his 85th birthday the night he dies, and when she was shown listening to Anna Netrebko’s recording of “Ah, fors’ è lui” from Verdi’s La Traviata, I joked, “She probably attended the world premiere!” (That was in 1853, by the way.) There’s also a hanger-on named Fran (Edi Patterson) whose relationship to the Thrombeys, if any, is never made clear, but she becomes important to the plot in the later stages. The official police investigating Harlan’s suspicious death are Lieutenant Elliott (LaKeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan), but the private detective and main “sleuth” character who shows up and ultimately solves the case is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, who’s played James Bond but you’d never guess it from his homely appearance here). Craig speaks his lines in a bizarre accent that’s part American Southern, part French and all so annoying a mishmash Charles was amazed that Diego Daniel Pardo was actually willing to take credit as Craig’s dialect coach. The McGuffin is the old one about the miserly old man who’s so sick of the greedy antics of his relatives that he disinherits them all and leaves his multi-million dollar fortune to caregiver Marta. Naturally the relatives are furious, and for a while I thought Rian Johnson was going to rip off Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and have all of them participate in Harlan’s murder.

There’s an odd scene in which Marta is shown functioning as Harlan’s caregiver and giving him his nightly dose of 100 milligrams of a drug he needs for his overall health and three milligrams of morphine to help him sleep – only Marta gets the vials mixed up and injects him with three milligrams of the therapeutic drug and 100 milligrams of morphine, and though her medical bag contains the antidote she can’t find it when she needs it. Only in a double-reversal it turns out that someone had switched the labels on the drugs before Marta gave them to Harlan, so he got the right combination of drugs after all. Marta then receives an anonymous letter that contains part of the medical examiner’s report on Harlan’s death, along with a handwritten note that reads, “I know what you did,” and she gets a note to come to a particular address where Fran (ya remember Fran?) will give her the rest of the report that will either condemn or exonerate her. In one of the film’s few genuinely compelling moments, she and Benoit Blanc (who has all Hercule Poirot’s annoying mannerisms and none of his Gallic charm) drive out to the medical examiner’s building in Boston (the story is set in Massachusetts) to pick up an extant copy of the medical examiner’s report – only when they get there the entire building is on fire, set ablaze by the villain to destroy all copies of the report. (This is 2019, when “the cloud” had long since become a “thing,” and I couldn’t believe a copy of the file containing the report didn’t exist somewhere off-site.)

Eventually the bad guy turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Ransom Drysdale, who set up the whole thing so Marta would appear to be the murderess and therefore legally barred from the inheritance, which would then go to the relatives as per Harlan’s previous will. Though Harlan’s death was actually a suicide (can you kill yourself by slitting your own throat? I doubt it), Ransom left Fran for dead and burned down the medical examiner’s building. The whole plot gets undone when Marta, who has a condition that makes her literally puke whenever she tries to lie, fields a call from the hospital where Fran was taken and says she pulled through – only it’s a trick; Fran is actually dead and Marta pukes all over Ransom, though only after her trick has yielded a confession from him. Fran even tried to give away the identity of her killer by saying, “Hugh did this,” though the cops and even Benoit Blanc heard that as “You did this,” meaning Marta. (This is a steal from Ed McBain’s first 87th Precinct police procedural, Cop Hater, in which the police are led down a false trail by a thickly accented Jewish woman who tells them a “carpenter” committed the murders – only it turns out she really meant “car painter,” and once the cops realize that they catch the actual criminal.) It’s hard to believe that this slow (it runs 130 minutes in a tale a classic-era director could have dispatched in less than an hour and a half), ponderous bore of a movie could have spawned a sequel already released (with Daniel Craig the only actor who carried over), one more on the way and a fourth one quite likely in the works, because Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig have said each will keep making Knives Out movies as long as the other is also involved.