A popular mystery writer named Harlan Thrombey is found dead with his throat slit after his 85th birthday. A private detective named Benoit Blanc is called to the Thrombey home anonymously to figure out if his death is in fact, a suicide or something far, far worse.
Unfortunately, yet another disappointment before the end of the decade that I hoped would not be, but ended up being unfortunately. Not a bad film by any means, just extremely flawed and not as “genius” as people make it out to be.
The cast genuinely did a good job, but I feel like outside of Armas, Craig, and Evans nobody really did anything of interest. The rest of the cast was just kinda there to bait people into seeing the movie, which is what I feared it would be, even though I hoped otherwise. While the rest of the cast did have some humorous lines here and there, they didn’t really do anything of interest. While you did have some genuinely great talent with Plummer, Curtis, Collette, and Shannon, great up and comings like Stanfield, Langford, and Martell, and hell even a has-been like Don Johnson, they aren’t there to really do anything so I’m still wondering why they’re there in the first place (well for Johnson, it might be to collect a paycheck). They could’ve easily been played by character actors or unknowns. Despite this though, Craig did steal the show with his laughably bad old school Southern accent and being the Poirot of this caper. He was a joy to see, and I’m glad he actually had something to do. Armas does do a rather good job as well, and Evans is extremely entertaining.
I think the pacing was decent in the first and third acts, but it went like a snail’s pace in the second act and just felt like a chore to sit through. I kept looking at my watch to see how much more I had to sit through, but as I said, it luckily picked up a bit towards the end. The cinematography was very good (especially with coming out of something like
Richard Jewell) and it felt like a lot of things popped in certain areas and was very… pleasurable I guess? I don’t know, I can’t really describe it, but it was certainly a lot more interesting to look at. I mean, it’s not Deakins levels, but it was very good. The humor was never gut busting, but I felt like the humor went along with the pace of the film, which I appreciated. Like the movie didn’t grind to a halt to tell a joke and then move on. The humor in it of itself was not amazing by any means, but I appreciated the execution.
The story is just… fine. It’s definitely not as intelligently constructed as people think it is. I think what Johnson was trying to do was create a deconstruction of murder mysteries but ended up failing miserably. The fact that everything was revealed in terms of Marta’s story at the end of the first act just felt like Johnson unironically using his “expectation subversion” technique without doing anything really interesting with it. Which is probably the reason I immediately checked out of the film when it was revealed. At that point, Johnson just took the mystery out of the “murder mystery” and he just didn’t execute the story properly if he was trying to do something unique with it. It didn’t feel like a twist with extra layers, it just felt like we got fed the entire movie and then later on Johnson remembered “oh shit yea, I have to put a twist in there”. It also REALLY didn’t help that the person behind everything was the most glaringly obvious person, that I initially thought it was a joke at first. It’s not Opera levels of stupidity (even though the rest of that film was so brilliantly executed by Dario Argento that the glaringly obvious twist wasn’t that bad in hindsight) but it still made me want to smack my head in frustration. When the person responsible said one specific line, I immediately knew that it was going to be him/her, but I initially didn’t take it seriously due to the obvious nature of it. Another thing that I didn’t really like was the political talk in the film. The use of “SJW snowflake” and “alt-right troll” just, IMMEDIATELY dated the movie and I was just rolling my eyes with the use of such words. They’re not even used cleverly or with an ongoing theme or anything, they’re just there because of jokes, possibly? Or fool idiots into thinking it’s smart commentary when it isn’t? I guess Johnson was trying to use it as a theme that no matter what side of the spectrum you’re on, you’re a dickbag either way since the entire Thrombey family are a bunch of assholes. But it’s not a theme that is consistent or comes off as clever, it just comes off as dated, annoying, and pointless. Additionally, I just felt like this was just a weaker and not as interesting version of Brick which in actuality, was an exceptional Rian Johnson neo-noir mystery. It goes in a completely different direction than this film does, and Johnson does that very well. Here, it just felt kind of empty, like Johnson wanted to homage yet deconstruct this sub-genre and it felt like a failure on both fronts. It honestly just felt like a weaker version of Clue which I am beginning to appreciate more and more. Clue manages to celebrate but poke fun at the sub-genre it’s presenting (as well as the board game it’s taking its namesake from), however, it does it in an entertaining yet well constructed way. While I did state that the third act is paced well, I felt that the exposition dump by Blanc was done in a rather lazy way (which again Clue manages to do more cleverly) and feels like even more of Johnson’s bullshit “expectation subverting”. Lastly, I wanted to also talk about how outside of Armas, Craig, and Plummer, literally the entire Thrombey family felt like the same character, which is why I couldn’t really comment on the performances that much before. They feel like the same character with maybe a different tweak added to make them appear different when they really aren’t. I felt like I was watching Mad Men all over again, where everyone is just an asshole and it’s so poorly executed that you end up not caring about almost everyone. I feel like Seinfeld was the only thing to get entertaining assholes done right.
With all of that, I you probably think I hate this movie, I don’t. It was a surface level entertaining movie. Somehow, Rian Johnson managed to make a turn your brain off murder mystery. An oxymoron that shouldn’t exist yet somehow does. It’s entertaining, but you end up not caring about the ingredients that should make it a good story.
Overall, it was an entertaining film. While it does have great performances from Armas and Craig, good cinematography, decent humor, and entertaining moments from the supporting cast, it becomes burdened with mediocre pacing, a piss poor mystery, a supporting cast that does nothing of interest to the story, political and social commentary that is a laughable afterthought, and Johnson’s bad attempts at expectation subverting and deconstructing a sub-genre.
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