Knives Out
Apr. 25th, 2020 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackKnives out was great fun!
Daniel Craig plays a modern independent detective, described with mild irony as the last of the gentlemen detectives. Sometimes he's just in the same general genre, but occasionally the film leans right into it and he drops a Holmes reference and it's never clear if it's the detective doing it on purpose or the film doing it in a world where no-one knew about the original.
I thought he would be good in this role and he was. But he has this great Boston accent and I just never got used to it. Like, obviously some people just have Boston accents and it doesn't have to be FOR anything, but it still just really stood out.
There's a dysfunctional extended family descended from a rich mystery writer, and the characters comment how his mansion leans into the genre too. His children, and their partners and wives, are all characterised very well. The observant biting businesswoman and her "I'm Important but I Don't Actually Have Anything to be Important At" husband. The frustrated son running his father's publishing company. The screwed up teenage grandson.
But the plot doesn't follow them, it follows the detective and nurse/companion to the old writer, and how they progress through the mystery and how they navigate his screwed up family. It's very well paced, flitting between flashbacks to show how events happened, and between different interrogations happening at similar times.
It wasn't perfect but I enjoyed it a lot, I'd certainly like to see more.
Spoilers relegated to the comments, read carefully if you haven't seen it.
Daniel Craig plays a modern independent detective, described with mild irony as the last of the gentlemen detectives. Sometimes he's just in the same general genre, but occasionally the film leans right into it and he drops a Holmes reference and it's never clear if it's the detective doing it on purpose or the film doing it in a world where no-one knew about the original.
I thought he would be good in this role and he was. But he has this great Boston accent and I just never got used to it. Like, obviously some people just have Boston accents and it doesn't have to be FOR anything, but it still just really stood out.
There's a dysfunctional extended family descended from a rich mystery writer, and the characters comment how his mansion leans into the genre too. His children, and their partners and wives, are all characterised very well. The observant biting businesswoman and her "I'm Important but I Don't Actually Have Anything to be Important At" husband. The frustrated son running his father's publishing company. The screwed up teenage grandson.
But the plot doesn't follow them, it follows the detective and nurse/companion to the old writer, and how they progress through the mystery and how they navigate his screwed up family. It's very well paced, flitting between flashbacks to show how events happened, and between different interrogations happening at similar times.
It wasn't perfect but I enjoyed it a lot, I'd certainly like to see more.
Spoilers relegated to the comments, read carefully if you haven't seen it.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-25 11:56 am (UTC)The "throws up when she lies" was ridiculous. ALMOST too over the top, but just such a hilarious and appropriate quirk for a detective story.
As was the "detective hired anonymously" premise. Such a natural and nice but unusual start to the plot.
About half way through we analysed everything we knew, and decided the old man had set the whole thing up, knocking over the medicine on purpose and switching them, having decided to commit suicide, or maybe, having already taken the antagonist to the morphine and arranged with some confederate to escape an autopsy once he'd been given the "wrong" dose.
We thought that it was a test for his family to see what they deserved, etc. And that he'd planned it so that his nice nurse/companion would be set up through bullying her into the whole "cover it up" plan, but compensated by getting the inheritance. And he'd hired the detective before his "death" because who else would hire a detective like that.
I still think that's better than the real answer in some ways: it means the old guy came up with this plan in advance, and there was a reason to force is nurse into covering up the accidental overdose, and a reason all the family squabbles and the death came to a head at once. And the real answer involved Captain America having a way too complicated plan, and the old guy improvising this whole cover up in 10 minutes.
But on the other hand, I agree it has some flaws. It falls into the flaw of later non-series detective fiction of having a "clever" answer, not a "fair" actual answer pointing to one of the original possible suspects and explaining which. I think I was led into that because for all the squabbling family, it never showed much detail about the problems of the rest of the family apart from James Bond, Captain America, and the nurse, so I never really considered it might have been one of them: there weren't enough clues either way to be ABLE to point to one of them.
And to be fair, Captain America WAS really dim so it makes sense he'd have a clever, impulsive, but over-complicated and stupid plan.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-25 11:59 am (UTC)If someone has a medical emergency: JUST CALL AN AMBULANCE! Even if you think it's too late. Only if you're ABSOLUTELY sure that that will be a bad outcome try to do anything else. That's exactly what the nurse wanted to do, and the old guy bullied her out of it, and if he hadn't, she'd have saved herself a lot of heartache and he'd be alive
no subject
Date: 2020-04-25 03:49 pm (UTC)