Movie Review | Knives Out
A brief consideration of the movie “Knives Out”
Knives Out is a good movie filled with great acting performances, it’s well-paced, and decently written and directed. Knives Out would have been the best movie of 2019, and perhaps one of the greatest whodunnit films since Sleuth if not for one glaringly-obvious oversight, which I’ll briefly consider.
The end of Knives Out is wrong.
Helpful Background Information
- If you haven’t seen Knives Out and care about spoilers, don’t read this article.
- If you’ve never seen Sleuth, the 1972 film starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, watch it as soon as possible. This article will only make sense if you’ve 1) seen Sleuth (1972); 2) seen Knives Out.
Briefly Considering the Ending of Knives Out
I’ll amend this article with detail at some point, but, and especially if you’ve seen Sleuth (1972), you surely picked up on the perfect (and literally countless, because there are so many it’s not worth counting) setups Knives Out had throughout the movie that pointed what would have been the perfect ending: Harlan Thrombe faked his death and staged the perfect final mystery for his perfect final novel, hired a buffoon private detective who thought he was a living archetype of Harlan’s literary fantasies, and set his entire shitcan family up to look like inheritance vultures that cared more about profiting off of Harlan’s life-long labor.
Ransom’s guilt was a lazy, short-sighted choice by Knives Out writer and director, Rian Johnson.
Jolly Jack Tar is in Knives Out, ffs! Come on!
