Film review: Knives Out (2019)

We've been re-watching (for Jami) and just watching (for me) the final season of Breaking Bad, so, as you'll understand if you've seen it, we wanted some light relief.  And a funny update on the 70's Agatha Christie adaptations (like the Murder on the Orient Express we watched a while back) starring James Bond doing a ridiculous Southern (Louisiana?) accent seemed just the ticket.

And indeed it was!  This is a very entertaining romp, with some wild implausibilities (a character who literally vomits if she doesn't tell the truth) and a thoroughly rotten rich family with people like Jamie Leigh Curtis having a wild time playing them, and Christopher Plummer as the family patriarch whose apparent suicide triggers the whole thing.  Plummer plays Harlan Thrombey, a self-made millionaire Christie-esque thriller-writer, who has decided that his family's dependence on his millions (his son Walt runs the publishing company set up just to publish Harlan's books, he set his daughter (Jamie Leigh Curtis) up in business, he supports at least two grandchildren's education, one of whom (Chris Evans in a thoroughly un-Captain America performance)

is a no-good playboy who's never had a job in his life) has harmed them terribly and, on the night they all gather for his 85th birthday (Plummer is actually 90!) he cuts each of them off in separate meetings, but does not announce this to the whole group (thus giving each of them a motive to bump him off before he does).  But his real cause of death is revealed to us to be a cover-up (by Harlan himself) for a fatal mistake by his loyal immigrant nurse (the excellent Anna de Armas, who is actually Cuban, one of the few nationalities that (in a running joke) the Thrombeys don't say she has) (another running joke is that several of them approach her individually and tell her that they were in favor of inviting her to the funeral but were outvoted) who mixes up his morphine with his other medicine and gives him a massive dose of the former (that would be the regular dose of the latter).  Harlan gives her advice of how to make it look like she wasn't there at the time of his death and then slits his own throat (with one of his large collection of knives).  Me telling you this is not really a spoiler, either, as this happens fairly early in the film.  She is the aforementioned regurgitative falsehood-avoider, and is understandably freaked out when Daniel Craig's drawling detective (Benoit Blanc) recruits her to be Watson to his Holmes. 

Things are of course complicated enormously when it emerges that Harlan left everything to her.  There are lots of satisfying occasions when hints at later developments are given in apparently throwaway lines, so you can feel clever if you remember them.  And unlike most murder films today (he said, making him sound like an old fogey) it's not unpleasantly gory.  In fact, apart from Harlan, there's only one other death.  Check it out - it's lots of fun - and actually better than the 70s films it's an homage to (right down the font, which looks like the kind used in the 70s on Christie paperback reprints).