Now here’s a mystery worth solving: Why doesn’t Hollywood give us more ridiculously complicated, gratuitously eccentric whodunits? You know, the kind of all-star affairs where a colorful assortment…
Now here’s a mystery worth solving: Why doesn’t Hollywood give us more ridiculously complicated, gratuitously eccentric whodunits? You know, the kind of all-star affairs where a colorful assortment of highly suspicious characters gather in a remote manor, or at an old castle, or on the Orient Express, in order to be confronted by a corpse and the prospect that a murderer lurks among them. It’s not that audiences have lost their appetite for such tales.
Twists abound in “Knives Out,” but by far the most unexpected is Johnson’s decision to treat this brain teaser as a comedy. Apart from the zany screwball headache that was “The Brothers Bloom,” the director’s films have been undeniably clever but distressingly serious. Here, he manages to blend the two, populating the Thrombey household with one-of-a-kind weirdos.
Craig is perhaps the only one whose performance seems to have spiraled out of Johnson’s control. The others are each encouraged to make an impression without leaving quite so many teeth marks on the scenery. And what scenery it is! The Thrombey estate is an art director’s dream, as production designer David Crank imagines a mansion that only a mystery novelist could fashion for himself, full of secret panels, back hallways and overt references to the genre .
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