#Blogtober 9 - Canary Duty - Knives Out (as seen at #LFF2019!)

I was just going to have this as part of another general post of rounding up London Film Festival titles, but this is a very big title, I'm still buzzing about it the morning after seeing it, and I have a lot to say.  That said, I should point out that this is of course going to be completely spoiler free, although given this is a very twisty murder mystery, with some surprises and revelations coming thick and fast at points, that's quite a hard task.  I am bigging this one up, even though it's already quite a high profile release this year, because I genuinely want this to succeed as best it can (not least because Rian Johnson has said he'd love to do more Benoit Blanc mysteries if it succeeds).  So without further ado, let's plunge the blade into Knives Out!

Writer/director Rian Johnson has professed his fandom for Agatha Christie and various other murder mysteries over the years, and this feels right out of that playbook.  Indeed, there are nods to various detective stories, everything from Sherlock Holmes to Jessica Fletcher, all over the place, in various forms, which do include subtle clues to the mystery itself.  One I liked early on was a shot of the mystery novels Christopher Plummer's character has written, one of which is called This Little Piggy, a clear nod to Christie's Five Little Pigs.  These references and nods though are all very subtle, none of them are obtrusive or take you out of this unique story; they're just little touches of...

Oh, speaking of him, like a lot of the best mystery films and shows, the cast is superb, with a lot of them somewhat playing against type; I love how many "Language" gags resulted from seeing Chris swearing up a storm in the first trailer.  (BTW, don't look up the most recent trailer, it hints a bit too heavily at certain matters).  Getting to see performers like Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, and more as part of this bickering, truly horrible family is an absolute joy, with everyone bouncing off each other well, having fine chemistry.  However, two cast members in particular deserve special praise; firstly there's Ana de Armas, who's playing a figure that's kind of a "Watson" in the story, our main guide through this tangled web.  She's someone who we'd happily follow all the way through this thing, has a very well used running gag with her character, and makes for a good contrast to the actual blood relatives tearing strips off each other.  But of course the other performance that people are going to be most impressed by in this whole affair is Daniel Craig as the detective Benoit Blanc.  He's a fantastic creation, sounding at times like Foghorn Leghorn playing Poirot, whilst on other occasions he shows that whilst he's very good at solving crimes, he's utterly useless at coming up with coherent metaphors for them.  Between this and Logan Lucky, Craig has shown a superb skill at funny character acting; one No Time to Die is done (which BTW also features Ana de Armas!), I can see has a great future in front of him in terms of more performances like this.  Someone get him in touch with the Coen Brothers ASAP!

So how's the mystery itself?  Well of course if I analyse that too much, it will give the game away.  Skirting around Spoiler City Limits then, it's a well done fair play piece; it doesn't rely on anything that the audience isn't let in on, you can play along, which is always fun.  Now I personally could figure out ahead of time where some things were going, but that's a real "your mileage may vary" point; given how many damn whodunnits I've seen, read, and listened to over the years, I have gotten good at spotting these things, so I can't really say if certain things are "too obvious".   I will say that though I saw them coming, the presentation of the reveal is pitch perfectly done; like a good joke, even if you guess the punchline, how the teller delivers it can still make you laugh. There are some big turns in here, a lot of hype is going to happen regarding it being some big re-invention of the genre; I'll say that's not really the case, but there's a lot that is novel about this particular story, it plays with the rules without ever 100% breaking them.  That's as far as I can go down the plot route without really giving the game away.  What I can add as far as story goes which isn't a spoiler is that there is also a solid sense of theming in here, and an appropriate one, carrying on a strong "f*** the 1%" message present in some of Johnson's other films, like The Last Jedi.  It's actually pretty appropriate for this story; let's face it, a lot of the scheming inheritors in many of Christie's works, if they were around today, probably would be die-hard GOP voters.

Knives Out is a superb crowd-pleaser of a thing, which deserves a big ol' box office return.  We had an OK Christie film on the big screen recently with Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express (he's filming Death on the Nile right now), and the Beeb has being having some new adaptations written by Sarah Phelps, so Whodunnits haven't really gone away in recent years.  This however feels like the shot in the arm the genre on film has needed for a while; a superb original example of the formula, one that stays true to the spirit whilst trying a few new things, and just showing how damn fun the genre is!  Definitely go for the first showing you can for this one, you don't want to be spoiled!  Oh, and if you're in the mood for more murder mystery mirth, look up a film called The Last of Sheila from 1973; it was a big inspiration for Knives Out, and is another great example of a cinematic fair-play whodunnit.

Knives Out will be released on Friday the 29th of November.