Knives out – movie review

 Another amazing movie recommendation from a friend of mine. I had watched this movie trailer couple of times and had given it a pass previously. Wasn’t sure how “James Bond” Daniel Craig would fit in role of a regular detective. After I saw the post that it was Agatha Christie meet Stephen king, was more than intrigued. As luck would’ve it, the movie was removed from the OTT I had subscribed for and after a hunt finally managed to catch hold of it. It not only has James Bond but also “Captain America” Chris Evans in it. Usually, people who get stereotyped into playing superheroes across couple of movies, find it hard to gel with regular characters shrugging off their much celebrated roles. With Avengers and Marvel universe movies running into dozens, any actor who had been part of those franchise have more or less settled for their career I guess. Both financially and variant role wise. It is very difficult to relate them to regular characters as well. Ditto goes for James Bond roles. Daniel craig is the most beefed up Bond ever to be shown on screen and hardly has a crack on his face emotion wise, in that franchise, where he only had to shoot and scoot with few dialogues in between.  Here, he does a Hercule Poirot on LSD kind of a role and despite his best efforts, looks hardly convincing as the bumbling yet shrewd detective. 

The story begins with an old man lying dead on his couch, with his neck slit open, inside a closed room. His entire family, having been assembled for his birthday, settled downstairs, each having more than sufficient reason to kill him, the needle of suspicion sways all over. With an anonymous client asking him to investigate, James Bond Daniel Craig, joins the party along with some Manguni police officers. There is one caretaker girl, very cute looking, who catches the eye, not just for her looks, as possible suspect. With her behaviour of puking whenever she tells a lie, avoiding drinks at the party, the director, very cleverly throws everyone behind her chase, hinting she might’ve been in a physical relation with the old man and this could’ve been a crime of passion. But with her blatant attempts at hiding her evidences out in the open and her repeated confession to anyone who care to hear about her role, it becomes evident very soon that she is not the one. Enter Captain America Chris Evans. With stories involving famous characters like James Bond meet Captain America on a murder mystery, it becomes quite obvious that one of them is the villain. With Bond being bumbling and trying his best to have a target behind his back, pretty soon it unravels who the actual villain is. The ending twist about the nature of crime was quite decent and the final scene where the caretaker girl stands on the balcony, having a coffee mug that says “My House” is a slightly evil twist as well. The story moves quite fast and there are no lag despite same scene gets repeated throughout first half from each person POV.

A nice watch for thriller buffs and quite a disappointment if you are looking for James Bond vs Captain America fist fight.