‘Knives Out’: Sleuth plays ripping game of Clue; family of vipers wonders whodunit

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s fizzy Agatha Christie riff “Knives Out” succeeds as a throwback with more than mere nostalgia on its mind. Against our current wash of grim Scandinavian serial-killer binge-watches, gory yet bloodless American police procedurals and endlessly streaming reruns of “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote,” this one’s a good time, period.

That’s all it’s trying for, and when a shrewd commercial storyteller provides such a thing, we do the result no favors by overinflating the achievement. The opening shots of “Knives Out” pay loving tribute to the memorabilia-crammed interiors of the 1972 film adaptation of “Sleuth.”

As with that self-aware examination of murder mystery tropes, this one puts us in the company of a famous and famously reclusive mystery novelist played by Christopher Plummer. The novelist comes with the blood-clot-tinged name of Harlan Thrombey. (Johnson’s script indulges in word games with several characters in more than one language.)

Harlan’s grown children, sycophants and weasels all, have gathered for the patriarch’s 85th birthday celebration. Harlan’s sympathetic home nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), is the conspicuous outsider at the gathering. “Anything you need, you’re a part of this family,” she keeps hearing, although nobody in this money-lined nest of vipers can correctly recall the Latin American nation from which her family hails.

“Knives Out” starts with Harlan’s corpse, then backs up to the night of the party. The extended family has its left and right flanks, politically, and the knives are out, metaphorically, early and often. For years, Harlan’s offspring have lived in fear of disinheritance. The movie sets up familiar dramatic situations in fresh ways, and, even when it doesn’t, Johnson’s script sneaks in little self-referential jabs.

Before a reading of the Thrombey will, for example, the drawling Southern detective played by Daniel Craig compares a typical reading-of-the-will scene to “a community theater production of a tax return.” That’s a typical Johnson line – quippy, not quite human speech, but not trying to be.

The widow of Harlan’s deceased son runs a line of “wellness” products named “Flam.” She’s played by Toni Collette, mistress of the unnerving side-eye. Everyone busts out the side-eye in “Knives Out.” Jamie Lee Curtis swans around imperiously as Linda, Harlan’s real estate mogul daughter.

In a dig at our current president, Linda brags about her self-made wealth, only to concede she would’ve been nowhere without the first million or so from dad. The cast could sell “Knives Out” even if it were “Spoons Out” or “Sporks Out.” Michael Shannon plays Walt, who runs dad’s publishing empire with an ambiguous set of business skills. Don Johnson plays the MAGA-loving conservative married to Linda.

These and others make up the Thrombey socio-economic bubble. The detective on the prowl, who goes by the color-coded name Benoit Blanc, knows he’s surrounded by deceit and at least one killer. While Craig’s dialect is plummy enough to make you wonder if it’ll eventually become a plot development, or a franchise spinoff, he’s the rock-solid center this confection needs.

The last 20 minutes do the job, but the goods delivered are the expected ones. The script may be too political for some and not pointed enough for others. The filmmaker has been there before. Two years ago, with “The Last Jedi,” Johnson enraged countless hordes of internet trolls whose reverence for the older, whiter, maler “Star Wars” movies turned them blanc with rage.

(One of the supporting characters in “Knives Out,” a budding white nationalist played by Jaeden Lieberher, amounts to a droll composite of seething “Star Wars” obsessives.) Johnson’s best move as screenwriter turns out to be pretty simple. He holds back a key character, the louche playboy grandson played by a clearly stoked Chris Evans, for a mid-movie entrance.

How this brazen charmer intersects with the plot already in motion turns “Knives Out” into a novelty both old school and newfangled. Even with some padding, it’s a whodunit canny enough to take the human stakes inside the artifice seriously. And that allows a fine ensemble of side-eye champs the leeway to make “Knives Out” funny, too.