Knives Out

I don’t like surprises. They never end well. Like when the teenagers smoking pot under the Garrison underpass ask, “Guess who’s going to punch you in the nuts.” Even if I guess right, there’s nothing but pain. Or, at Christmas, trying to guess what’s in all those big boxes under the tree and hoping I will be surprised that all of the ones addressed to Mrs. Filthy are actually for me and they contain Four Loko and those building toys with the magnets in them that you can swallow and later feel different parts of your intestines click together. They never are. It’s always just more buttons and zippers and shit like that. One year, I thought I would surprise myself, so I got blackout drunk and went shopping. On Christmas morning I opened a used adult diaper, a sweat sock full of deviled ham and a broken zip tie with human hair knotted to it.

I don’t like mysteries, either, unless they feature middle-aged women who also knit and have cats. And the title is a pun. I only read those because one of these days I will find one where the heroine uses her knitting needle first to pleasure herself and second to gouge out the eyes of a priest/murderer. That hasn’t happened yet, at least not in this universe, but I bet it’s going on all the fucking time in some parallel universe. Somewhere, there’s a sweaty, hot bloodbath that we won’t find until our physicists work harder. Let this be their incentive.

I once bought this Scooby Doo puzzle at a thrift store because part of the cover was missing and I thought maybe it was the mythical one in which Velma is oiled up and topless. It had 100 pieces, which is a two magnitudes more difficult than what I’m used to. When I got it home and after about three days of work I realized half the pieces were missing. So, I still don’t know what Velma’s tits look like, dry or glistening, and I broke Mrs. Filthy’s favorite cut glass ash tray in my anger. Then I stepped on the glass and cut my foot, and we didn’t have any rubbing alcohol for the wound because I had mixed it with Kool-Aid the night before. The cut got all infected and I kept having to suck pus out of it with my mouth so I could fit in my shoes. This is what every mystery feels like to me.

That’s how Knives Out felt; it’s a twisty, turny whodunnit set knowingly on the foundation of basically 80% of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. It takes place almost entirely in a baroque countryside mansion of a wealthy old mystery writer (Christopher Plummer). It’s his 85th birthday and his backstabbing, greedy offspring have gathered to celebrate, but also to be told one-by-one that they are being cut off and out of his inheritance. They’re all little shits, or grown-up shits, I guess. The result of a lot of prune juice and Metamucil, because that’s how old people fuel their poop factories. The kids badly want to keep sucking from the teat of their father’s empire.

Plummer seems in good spirits and sort of perversely pleased to finally be cutting off his ungrateful offspring. Then he is dead, apparently having slit his own throat in the night. His loyal, and kind-hearted caretaker (Ana de Almas) was the last person to see him alive. It seems a clear-cut case of suicide, but not for eccentric, intuitive and unfortunately southern-accented private eye Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) who has been hired by an unknown person to dig a little deeper.

As in every one of these stories, the dirty laundry and secret deals among the family and the staff are revealed and everyone seems to have a motive. All except that waif of a caretaker. And yet, when the will is read, guess who the old man left everything to? Yeah, you guessed it. Everyone did about five minutes into the movie. That’s not the central mystery of Knives Out, though.

Knives Out is playing with the genre and the clichés. The big mansion, the rivaling siblings, the gathering for the reading of the will, secret doors and lots of overheard snippets of conversation. Director/writer Rian Johnson knows he’s walking down a well-trod path, and I guess that’s what people call an homage. It’s also the beauty of sturdy genres, though, that they can handle yet another person piling onto them. The structure can withstand and shitload of redecorating, which is why it’s been done so often.

Johnson has played with genre before, such as with the shitacular and pretentious Brick in which he tried to make a Dashiell Hammett movie in a high school. That thing was all show and no go, the working of a young director whose certainty of cleverness way outstripped the actual cleverness. This time, though, it seems Johnson is playing within bounds and building his story within the tight confines of Agatha Christie and using quality elements.

Is it good? How the fuck would I know. It’s well made, the twists are plausible at least for the time you’re in the theater. The twists are mildly surprising. There is a variety of cast members who chew scenery like hungry termites like they are supposed to. Just to prove that Johnson knows it’s a lark he references to Christie and the game Clue and, for fuck’s sake, the dead guy was a mystery writer.

But I hate playing games where the entire premise is you are one step behind the person making it all up. I was not that engaged. I was just a guest in this big mansion wondering why the fuck anyone would build it when there are so many better and ore original stories that don’t rely so fucking heavily on big surprises to be told. Maybe mysteries are your thing, and maybe you have cats and jot down the recipes from the ones with southern cooking sleuths, or you like that dumbass shit about arcane codes hidden in Catholic statuary then you’ll probably like this movie.

Me, I like Velma’s tits, and I don’t want any surprises when I finally see them. Two Fingers for Knives Out.