When I wrote my last review (Looper), I had no idea that I’d unintentionally watched two Rian Johnson movies in a row. (Remember, I’ve already watched 30 movies before mid-February has even hit, so I’m still trying to catch up on my previous watches for the purpose of this blog). Anyway, what I’m saying is, these movies are completely opposite to one another and I didn’t even know they had the same director until recently.
As with Johnson’s 2012 movie, I wasn’t deeply impressed by this one either. After reading reviews and comparing them to my thoughts, it seems that I’m one of the very few people who just didn’t enjoy Knives as much as I was supposed to.
I will warn you now: there are spoilers ahead.
So what’s good about this movie? Well that’s obvious: the cast are brilliant. There aren’t too many ensemble movies going about these days, with the exceptions being most of Wes Anderson‘s back catalogue, and some of Tarantino‘s movies to an extent. Any movie that stars Don Johnson and Toni Collette automatically gets Brownie points from me, so that’s a big fat tick in my “decent movies” checklist.
Now here’s where the spoilers come in…
I was expecting more of a classic whodunnit with this movie. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone in with any expectations, but that is really how the trailer advertised this to me. So the fact that we found out within the first 45 minutes who the killer was, and then got taken on a journey of how said killer would get away with it just kind of disappointed me in the end. There was so little mystery that I felt a bit snoozy after an hour.
I also wanted more quirky. Sure, Daniel Craig provides a little bit of that with his ridiculous accent and donut-hole metaphors, but I wanted it to be more Clue than it was. It just never hit that mark for me despite a plot twist or two being quite good.
Honestly, I don’t have too much more to say about this film. The soundtrack was probably my favourite part of it (both score and use of popular music), and the majority of performances were unsurprisingly good too.
Once again, this is a movie that kind of fell middle-of-the-road for me. Maybe I’m just not a huge Rian Johnson fan? Who knows? All I know for sure is that this shouldn’t have been nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, and I definitely won’t be in a rush to see the now green-lit sequel. Not sorry.
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