Knives Out had me with the directness of its setup: a fancy manse; a rich, dysfunctional family; and a shocking murder in need of a solution. In walks Detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig), a master crime-solver with a résumé as thick as his southern accent. “I suspect foul play … I have eliminated no suspects,” he intones when asked why he’s there. The writer and director Rian Johnson, who assembled this project quickly after spending years in the franchise-filmmaking trenches with The Last Jedi, initially seems to be seeking out simplicity—a traditional drawing-room whodunit right out of Agatha Christie’s library. But the fun really begins when Knives Out starts flouting its genre’s rules.

1. Knives Out Hercule Poirot
2. Knives Out Hercule Poirot's Christmas

Knives Out (66,553) IMDb 7.9 2 h 10 min 2019 X-Ray PG-13 When renowned crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is found dead at his estate, the inquisitive Detective Benoit Blanc is mysteriously enlisted to. 'Clue' (1985) is a whodunit murder mystery with comedic elements. Based on the classic board. High quality Knives Out gifts and merchandise. Inspired designs on t-shirts, posters, stickers, home decor, and more by independent artists and designers from around the world. All orders are custom made and most ship worldwide within 24 hours. When we spoke to Rian Johnson regarding Knives Out and its origins within the works of Agatha Christie. Curtain was crafted as Poirot’s final send-off, but when Christie survived Hitler’s.

That inventiveness shouldn’t be too surprising given Johnson’s career. Starting in 2005 with his breakout debut, Brick, a teenage noir homage, he’s been a filmmaker who draws from the classics but gives them sparkly new packages. Even The Last Jedi challenged the storytelling conventions of the long-winded Star Wars saga with humor and pique, rather than just reaffirming them (and stunned many a fan as a result). While Knives Out is a more straightforward proposition, a murder mystery that ties up every loose end, many of its best thrills come in the narrative hairpin turns Johnson makes along the way.

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The film keeps the crucial tropes of a Christie plot, namely ostentatious wealth, a cast of colorful characters with blaring personality disorders, and a cunning detective who lives only to crack the case before him. Yet it’s set in the present day, dispensing with the antiquated fortunes of Poirot’s usual suspects. Instead, Johnson conjures a coterie of modern, rich buffoons—all of them related to the successful crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who is found stabbed on the night of his 85th birthday.

Who could’ve done it? There’s Harlan’s daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collette), a self-styled lifestyle guru who dispenses quack medical advice that even Gwyneth Paltrow would wrinkle her nose at. His daughter, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), is a real-estate mogul who constantly brags about being “self-made” despite receiving her father’s support. Harlan’s son, Walter (Michael Shannon), runs his dad’s publishing company, where his entire job seems to consist of printing and selling his father’s latest masterpiece. Even the grandkids, who include the handsome-jerk playboy Ransom (Chris Evans) and the taciturn alt-right-troll teenager Jacob (Jaeden Martell), are curdled in their own ways. Amid all the chaos and bickering, Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s live-in nurse, gets patronizing head pats from the rest of the family but is otherwise largely ignored.

Detective Blanc is ostensibly the film’s hero and serves as the audience’s surrogate, interrogating family members and sniffing around for clues. But Marta is the heart of the movie—a character who might easily be dismissed as a stock supporting role, but whom Johnson plants in the foreground. There’s no subtlety to Johnson’s message: The film champions a hardworking daughter of immigrants in a film about upper-class snobs scrambling to secure their inherited wealth. This is 2019, and one of the villains is a pale teen boy who posts offensive invective on Twitter.

But the detective genre has never been subtle. It’s a world where the investigator is intelligence personified and the suspects (as well as the viewers) are his captive audience, waiting for the answers to be revealed after two hours of careful deduction. Through Marta and Detective Blanc, who become impromptu partners in search of the truth, Johnson is telling a story about what justice might look like in America today—while also having plenty of fun.

The film’s advertising has obscured almost every detail of the plot besides the absolute basics, a difficult achievement today. So I’ll say only that while Knives Out is a whodunit with a twist ending, it’s just as concerned with why and how the murder was done as it is with the killer’s identity; the seemingly huge pieces of information dropped early on turn out to be small pieces of the puzzle. The art of a cinematic murder mystery is to make the act of putting clues together seem suspenseful and worth watching. In the hands of Craig at his most gleeful, de Armas at her career best, and Johnson oozing love for the genre, Knives Out rises splendidly to the task.

The butler did it, you say? In Rian Johnson’s new movie, this mothballed murder mystery cliche gets a welcome airing out.

Knives Out pays clever homage to British crime writer Agatha Christie while also rewriting her treatment of social class in her novels, stories and plays. The movie is set in America but the set-up is classic Christie. The wealthy patriarch of a large and unwieldy clan has died the day after a tense and argument-laden birthday party. The manner of death suggests suicide – but is it? The entire family is suspect. A will is to be read. A flamboyant detective with a French-sounding name arrives on the scene.

A non-family member is a part of the mix, and the importance given to her character reflects the movie’s attempt at weaving social commentary into a classic whodunit yarn. Marta (Ana de Armas) is the Spanish-speaking nurse of bestselling author Harlan (Christopher Plummer). Marta is unable to lie and vomits when asked to do so. This characteristic reaps rich dividends after Harlan is found dead in his study, and is especially lucrative if you ignore the niggling question about why a nurse wouldn’t seek treatment for her own peculiar condition.

Harlan’s warring wards makes for easy suspects. His daughters Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Joni (Toni Collette) and son Walt (Michael Shannon) are polished dispensers of platitudes and shedders of crocodile tears. Harlan’s grandson Hugh (Chris Evans) is a dissolute playboy, while son­-in-law Richard (Don Johnson) has a skeleton in his closet that pops out in most spectacular fashion.

The stellar cast is toplined by a superb Daniel Craig as private investigator Benoit Blanc. The name is a hat-tip to Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot. Benoit has Poirot’s sang-froid and self-regard but also a hilariously earthy American accent – an early indication of the way in which the movie is both respectful of Christie as well as irreverent.

Several Christie devices litter Benoit’s investigation – the significance of seemingly stray remarks; the unreliability of witness testimonies and flashbacks; the small clues that add up to important discoveries; the detective who is part-conjurer and part-psychologist. Poison, Christie’s preferred mode of killing, gets a contemporary update. Harley’s mansion resembles a wealthy prop manager’s storage unit, and perhaps the most striking item on the sets is a chair made out of glistening knives that turns out to have an important cameo in this game of thrones.

The sharp writing never feels dated even though the murder mystery is resolutely old-school. The tone is light and easy, and the critique of class prejudice and snobbery cuts sharply but not deep. Household help made significant contributions to Christie’s plots, and this contemporary rewrite provides new, imaginative ways with which to regard the small army of butlers, cooks and caretakers who watched their affluent employers kill or be killed. In Knives Out, the best joke is the constant misidentification of Marta’s country of origin. Is she Paraguayan? Brazilian? That’s like asking whether Hercule Poirot was French.

Knives Out Hercule Poirot

Knives Out Hercule Poirot's Christmas