KNiVES OUT (2019)
a review by Evan Landon
Ever seen Clue? It had that one guy from Spinal Tap, the old It Pennywise guy, and the chick from Young Frankenstein is in it too. It is a classic. It really is not what we base our whole Who-Dun-Its around these days, I am sure of that. At least not here. We model a take on what a good mystery is these days. No? Maybe, we should get the local theater crew to work out a few scenes and they could do a better job than this one.
Simplistic work by Daniel Craig & the rest of the cast, by the way. You completely forget James Bond can pull off Foghorn Leghorn for a few hours. Chris Evans pulls off a mundane task as an entitled prick who shows up halfway through. I mean, he was phoning this one in, but he knows how to flawlessly pull that character off, for whatever reason. Toni Collette kills it, as does Don Johnson (who I really felt got the shaft for some awesome scenes). The kid from It: Part One gets the weirdest casting as a teenage Nazi sympathizer because whatever happened to that subplot? Jamie Lee Curtis does a mediocre job as well. Christopher Plummer is probably the best out of all of them, but he is hardly in this dreck.
I don't wanna give up the ghost this far into a review, but you get the killer in the first act. BAM! Then, you get to figure out how much all these “Blue Blood Eat Their Youngest” and realize that this is not a murder mystery anymore. This script lets you know it right off the bat, so there really is nothing to figure out.
What a drab script from Rian (I-killed-the-Star-Wars-franchise-oh-wait-it-was-alreads-dead-with-'The Last Jedi') Johnson. We love you, Rian. Don't ever change. Great work on trying to rekindle the Who-Dun-Its that were so popular like a century ago, but this fell flatter than Nebraska for me. I have never wanted to throw the remote at my television anymore than when watching this filth in years.
Anyways, this movie was a critical darling because of it's views on “class warfare” and “racism”, plus it brought in $312.9 million against a $40 million budget, so it definitely does not need a leg up from your's truly. If somebody gave me money to write a stellar review for this, I would probably burn it in front of them and thank them for the reach around.
2 out of 5