Like it or not, Knives Out was approved of by a lot of fans even though there are plot holes in this thing that a truck could drive through at high speed. Perhaps one of the biggest problems with a ‘whodunnit’ movie these days is that the story has become so elaborate just to keep people from guessing who’s responsible that eventually it will end up pointing right at the killer without meaning to. Hey, you make enough lefts it turns into a right, right? In all fairness the movie wasn’t too bad as it did feature an A-list cast, in part since it’s hard to know if Don Johnson is still an A-lister technically or if he’s slipped down the ranks a bit. In any case the acting was great enough since really the characters were easy to hate or like, but one does have to wonder just how often Marta had to go around cleaning up puke if she was that sensitive to lying. Also, she’s had quite a bit of time to get used to it since she would appear to know just where to go at times when it comes to chucking whatever is in her stomach at that given moment. Seriously, she must brush her teeth on the regular since otherwise she might be wearing falsies after a while since otherwise all that stomach acid would….okay, yeah, blah.
Anyway, the Thrombey’s are perhaps one of the most vile families to come along in a while, especially if their patriarch was willing to clean house and write them all out of the will and give everything to Marta, who is likely the most unassuming character in the whole story. The fact that he went ahead and left her everything is the kind of rags to riches story that people tend to like, but done in this manner it’s obvious that Rian Johnson might not have been a big Cinderella fan back in the day since this is about the most messed up way that a maid can become this rich in such a short time. But one has to assume that the senior Thrombey had a massive amount of issues of his own to punch his own clock like he did since the survival instinct of many human beings is a bit hard to work past when it comes to putting a knife to your own throat and pulling it across with enough force to do the job.
On the other side of this story, Benoit Blanc is about as close to Inspector Clouseau as we can get without going full Pink Panther as we can get. He’s definitely good enough at what he does but let’s be fair here and say that Daniel Craig was NOT meant to try and pull off a southern accent, no how and no way. He’s still a great actor but what Johnson was thinking of when he was putting the character through his paces is still kind of hard to see as there are a few scenes in which even Lakeith Stanfield’s character looks as though he wants to put the boot the detective and figure things out on his own. Honest Trailers and CinemaSins are pretty good at finding a host of things that are wrong with many movies and they do so in a way that’s thankfully hilarious since otherwise it would just feel mean-spirited and not at all warranted at times. Nicole Laporte of Fast Company can tell you more about this. But let’s face it, even the best movies that we absolutely love are, at times, kind of riddled with holes and inconsistencies that the director either didn’t care that much about or wasn’t really thinking about filling when the final product rolled around. In a sense it feels as though Rian Johnson was really trying to pull people into the story more than he was trying to get them to obsess about any one thing in particular since the way it moves along is suggestive of a narrative that doesn’t want to dwell on too much until it’s the right time. Of course when that ‘right time’ came along a lot of people had already deduced just what had happened since the movie made it pretty plain. Plus, the neck wound that the elder Thrombey gave himself was a little too hard to miss since even a junior detective should have been able to deduce just how it happened.
Again, the story was good enough, the acting was well done, and the overall presentation wasn’t horrible or even worth knocking all that much, but upon closer inspection even blockbusters are seen to make a lot of mistakes and can have enough holes poked in them to make the movie feel as though it might have been colossal failure. This time around though it worked, so long as you don’t look too hard at it.
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