Movie Review: Can you stomach ‘Knives Out’?

By Claire Convis
Staff Writer

Grade: B+

See it if: You like quirky crime stories.

Skip it if: You hate puking. And knives.

When famous crime and mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey is found dead in his grand old house the morning after his 85th birthday, Detective Benoit Blanc shows up at the estate ready to investigate.

It seems everyone in the family has a motive to murder the old man, a bone to pick with another family member and a dirty secret up their sleeve.

The cigar-smoking southern detective Blanc, played smoothly by Daniel Craig, tries to decipher the suspicious line of events that led to Harlan’s demise. As the film frequently switches from flashbacks to present day, Blanc searches for the pieces of the puzzle he’s been anonymously hired to assemble.

“Look around; the guy practically lives in a Clue board,” one of the officers says in the film, glancing around the estate, and he isn’t wrong. Blanc interrogates the family members as they sit in a chair with a spreading display of knives behind them, a decoration so extreme it belongs in “Game of Thrones.”

The Thrombey family shouting at each other over politics will make you feel like you’re in your own living room at Thanksgiving in 2016. The family is compared to a pack of vultures for a good reason.

Marta, the young caretaker of the late Harlan, has a regurgitative reflex to lying—that is, she cannot physically tell a lie without vomiting. Therefore, Blanc especially wants to question her, thus the warning to skip this film if projectile puking isn’t your thing.

Marta is played wonderfully by Ana de Armas in this modern take on the classic whodunit, and hey, who doesn’t want to see Chris Evans in a white sweater? Fans of Agatha Christie-like novels will enjoy this lively film, with a plot that twists and turns as much as a steering wheel in a car chase.

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