Finally got round to seeing this, and was a bit disappointed.
I had concerns going in about an old-school whodunnit, but I think the things I had concerns about were all successfully executed:
[ul]
[li]The story had the right amount of twists. You can’t play this kind of story straight any more; we’re all too familiar with it. But an overly twists-on-twists heist-style story has itself become cliche. They got the balance right IMO.[/li][li]The plot made logical sense. You need to suspend disbelief about how much the detective can infer, but I can’t think of much else. The whole thing basically stood up.[/li][/ul]
But it still left me somewhat empty at the end. I think it’s missing some of the more fun elements of a whodunnit, which I list below. In fairness the things I’m listing here are stylistic choices; there’s nothing to say a whodunnit has to feature these things, but in their absence, I’m not sure what should go there instead.
Fun characters. OK, Evans and the girl were very good, but no-one else really stood out for me. I appreciate what Daniel Craig was trying to do, but the likeability just wasn’t there for me. Meanwhile Christopher Plummer would have showed all the other spoiled heirs how to do it back in the day, but unfortunately has now aged out of a role like that.
Clues. It’s still a film where you can play along and try to guess who did what, but I like this genre when random clues are thrown out that later will be explained. Those teasers can add a lot in getting you sucked in.
Fear. At the end of the day, someone died, and I like it when there’s also a sinister, dark edge to proceedings. Which there was, but only in the third act, and not very much.
I watched it a third time and it still holds up. Knowing the entire plot, you can see how the characters’ movements and reactions all fit into the overall story while still hiding the final payoff. I rented it on Amazon and watched Blanc’s monologue 3 or 4 times and it’s fun to pay attention to the small details, like Blanc dressing for action (taking off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, tucking in his tie).
It is such a tight and well-constructed script that it’s hard to reconcile with the dumpster fire that was The Last Jedi.
I have now seen this movie way too many times to be healthy. Blanc’s monologue is–to use a cliche–a tour de force. My one quibble with it is that he never explicitly says the tox report shows no morphine in Harlan’s blood. After he says “because you are a good nurse” he could have said the tox report proves it conclusively.
(Marta’s sad and confused look while Blanc is explaining this is excellent acting.)
If Ransom does nothing then Marta gets the money. Even if he somehow gets Marta to confess the tox report proves her innocence. In Blanc’s words: “he has lost”. So Random goes all in: he decides to destroy the tox evidence and try to make it look like Marta was responsible, which is why he lights the tox report on fire and leaves it near Fran’s body. He can then disclose Marta’s confession, she’ll concur, and nobody will be the wiser.
Blanc also knows that Greatnanna saw Ransom climbing down the trellis which is why they brought him in for questioning after the car chase. When Blanc learns that the tox report says morphine wasn’t involved he’s able to piece it all together. And in the end it relies so much on “Why was I hired?!”
Finally saw this last night. I’m glad they didn’t go down the “everyone did it” route. You see that twist once, you’ve seen it 1000 times.
Am I the only one who thought at one point that Marta did it on purpose, and the whole “can’t lie” business was just one long con? I was very happy to be wrong.
I’m also happy they didn’t go down the whole route of making Blanc a Sherlock-type who can tell you everything that happened just based on a piece of grass on your shirt. He was smart and had his suspicions, but clearly unsure as to what was going on the whole time.
It works better to view this as a comedic farce than as a whodunit.
Part of what bothered me was the Go game they were allegedly playing. I play a mediocre game of Go. Simple rules but there is a reason it tool AI much longer to beat human players than it did chess. Didn’t bother me too much that what they were doing on the Go board was not playing Go. Did bother me that it is clear that Harlan takes his game playing seriously and that there is no possible way either Ransom or Marta as relative novices could beat Harlan at the game unless he was in the habit of throwing the games to them … which should have been something of significance!
My favorite bit is how the woman who no one of the family can remember if she comes from Paraguay or Ecuador or somewhere else ends up looking down on them on the outside while holding the “My House My Rules” cup.
Resurrecting the thread because I saw this movie last night. My wife suggested it because she had read some strong reviews, but I had never heard of it, and sat down on the couch without knowing a single thing about it.
I will admit that I’ve never been a big fan of the Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, so the movie was always going to struggle with me, but once I saw the cast I was optimistic. I’m a huge fan of Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Lakeith Stanfield, and I like Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer and the rest of the cast just fine. I’d never seen Ana de Armas in anything before (still haven’t seen Blade Runner 2049), but I thought her performance was very good.
But while I had a few laughs at particular lines, and some of the set design was fantastic, on the whole I thought it was a two-hour waste of an excellent cast. I found Daniel Craig’s character both annoying and unconvincing, Lakeith Stanfield had very little to do, and while Toni Collette was great as always, it all seemed like it was in the service of a big fat nothingburger of a story. I never really gave a shit exactly how the death came about, or who done it. And my wife, who had been very keen to see it, was pretty underwhelmed as well.
It’s clear that I’m in the small minority here. Almost everyone in this thread loved it, and it has a critics rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it gets a big fat “meh” from me. Not bad in any particular way, not offensive or especially stupid; just two hours where I was looking at my watch every 15 minutes.
Just saw it, and really enjoyed it. A great cast and an engagingly knotty plot. I didn’t recognize Ana de Armas, the lead actress, from having seen her (made much more beautiful) in Blade Runner 2049. And I didn’t recognize Frank Oz at all as the exasperated lawyer - I thought it was Dabney Coleman at first. Great to see Emmet Walsh, as always!
I must have missed something, but when did Ransom drug the housekeeper in the abandoned store? He was with Marta just before that, I thought, and then was immediately taken into custody by the police. Or was her drugging not the same gonna-die-in-ten-minutes dose that Harlan thought he’d gotten?
It’s been awhile, but I think he met with Fran first. He told Marta that the meeting was later (remember it was initially a blackmail attempt of Ransom by Fran - Ransom just turned it into a threat from Fran to Marta). During his meeting with Fran he drugged her and then was going to have the cops grab Marta when she showed up at the place where the body was.
What did he drug Fran with, then? If it was the same stuff Marta and Harlan thought the old dude’d been dosed with, no way could he have done that, met up with Marta, looked over the burned-out coroner’s office with her, and taken part in the slow-speed chase before Marta parted from him, drove Blanc into town, parked, went in and found Fran, still alive. That would’ve taken a lot more than ten minutes.
I thought that Ransom’s plan was wonky from the start. I understand the setup. Harland tells him that he and his brothers and sisters are worthless spoiled brats, so they get nothing in his will and Marta gets it all. Ransom also understands the slayer statute so that if he can frame her for murder or negligence causing his death, then she gets nothing and his family gets their share. So he concocts a plan to switch the medication so that Marta “accidentally” overdoses him and whether it ends up murder or civil liability, doesn’t matter. I’m good up to there.
But what did he expect would happen? Without the intervening suicide, Harlan would be found in his bed or on his sitting room couch dead. There isn’t going to be an autopsy or an investigation; it’s an 85 old sick man that died in bed. It happens all of the time. Call the funeral home. I doubt the cops even show up. The only way that the cops show up is for Ransom to call them, say he suspects Marta because of the will, but in doing so, he puts as much suspicion on himself, and everyone else in the house, because of the slayer statute.
They all had access to the bag with the medicine. Who has the motive? Marta would would be a multimillionaire in a few years at most. They all get nothing unless they frame Marta. If I am a cop, she is the last person I suspect.
However, the unexpected happens. Instead of being found in his bed, his throat is cut in an apparent suicide. Ransom secretly calls Blanc to investigate. But if he died by suicide, then Marta is not a slayer. Unless he wants to argue that she gave him an ultra lethal dose of medication only to cut his throat.
He basically is harming his best argument: Harlan changed the will to leave everything to a caregiver (always a prima facie case of undue influence) and look how crazy he was…crazy enough that his will was invalid…who slices their own throat like that? Poor, Dad, may he rest in piece.
It was still just one piece - he didn’t cut his head clean off.
I can accept Ransom’s bad plan because he just wasn’t all that bright. It was most of a good plan. One key thing he didn’t count on was Marta actually giving Harland the correct drug, despite the mislabeling.
Every mistake after that was Ransom improvising in a hurry and not being smart.
He wouldn’t have died in bed. According to Marta he was going to die in just a few minutes and she was going to call 911. If A) Marta had actually given him the morphine and B) Harlan hadn’t stopped her from calling 911, the plan would have worked.
However, the unexpected happens. Instead of being found in his bed, his throat is cut in an apparent suicide. Ransom secretly calls Blanc to investigate. But if he died by suicide, then Marta is not a slayer. Unless he wants to argue that she gave him an ultra lethal dose of medication only to cut his throat.
The cops were going to declare it suicide. He contacts Blanc to try and prove it was murder.
Right. At that point, Ransom’s only hope was that a detective might look deeply enough to find enough evidence to prevent Marta from inheriting, while he (Ransom) also tried to provoke Marta into confessing what she believed she had done.
And then the police find a dead rich guy - and the last person to see him alive is his nurse and new heir - and an autopsy will find the cause of death was a drug injected by the nurse. Ransom has every reason to expect that that would be sufficient.
Blanc’s monologue is–to use a cliche–a tour de force. My one quibble with it is that he never explicitly says the tox report shows no morphine in Harlan’s blood. After he says “because you are a good nurse” he could have said the tox report proves it conclusively.