#though MC tries her damnedest to give a convincing performance

[goldensadnessdolphin]

I just watched Knives Out and it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen

Long story short: Horrible acting on the detective, the movie tries to be funny but isn't, none of the cast work together and the happy end resolution is contorted in a horrible way just so the main character can leave without blemishes

Short story long:

Basic setup is that the incredibly wealthy patriarch kills himself and a "master detective" has been called in anonymously to give the situation a look over.

The movie starts with very boring testimonies made by really bad stereotypes. We get flashbacks to things they've heard and want to bend before the detectives, which is decent.

You may note that I said "detectives". There are multiple but only one of them is even relevant. The other two are very, very poor comic relieve and straight officer. None of them add anything aside from awkwardness and something the main detective can say "no" to, in a feeble attempt to create a Columbo-esque weird personality.

That main detective is played by Daniel "most wooden male actor" Craig, playing him with an unconvincing pseudo-texan(?) accent. He plays exactly two faces: laughter (which is uncomfortable and seems fake) and I am Male, White and Conventionally Attractive with the midlife crisis version of an early 2000s duck face. Through the entire movie.

The main character is an immigrant nurse tending to patriarch, which of course let's the movie go for the horrible and completely unnecessary "Trump is good/Illegal immigrants deserve having their kids locked up in cages" perspective on some characters. This aids in nothing but making the main character blackmailable because of her mother. That thread is picked up once in the movie but leads to no consequence for anyone and has no actual bearing on any significant behaviour. You could cut that out completely and the movie wouldn't change.

The hook throughout the movie is that we learn early on that MC seems to have accidentally lethally drugged patriarch. She mixes up his actual medication for an equivalent dose of morphene. So they hatch a convoluted and in itself damning plan to get MC out of the investigations at which point the patriarch commits suicide. Since we know this so early on, the entire testimony/motive/character psychology we build up before gets thrown to the side. You know, the thing that makes a viewer engage with the story to puzzle on the scenario on their own? The thing that makes murder mystery interesting?

The testimony phase only establishes that everyone aside from baby booboo MC is sleazy, lying and has something to hide. You know, the thing that we all assume because it's a fucking murder mystery

We also give the MC an extremely specific flaw: When she thinks about lying, she has to vomit. Yes, this will very grafically be shown. Yes, it is mostly regarded as kind of a joke.

So, we have the exact knowledge of what happened like 30 minutes in, the only time the other characters are shown is them bickering which definitely doesn't get old like 30 minutes into the first scene and the detective keeps MC as his "Watson" (literally calling her that). Because obviously she can't lie. Aside from obfuscating the truth or ACTUALLY LYING in the detectives faces when she is asked about the night of the death. She says she administered "3 grams" or some shit of Morphene when she at that time is convinced of giving him something obscene like 100. No puking. Nothing.

Then we have the hijinks of the detective and MC trying to piece together what happened. Which involves a Scream quality top joke like chucking a piece of scaffolding away while the detective stands right there. That scaffolding having broken away when MC made her roundabout way back to the scene of the suicide because comedy clothing swap being used to make it appear like patriarch is still alive. That piece of scaffolding is later brought back by a dog. It is badly shot, badly executed to rebound in the plot, the works.

At some point, the Will gets read and has been altered a week before the death. What does it say? Everything, including the house, belongs to MC. The whole family goes to shit, they try to get the Will revoked or for MC to refuse it, screaming at her. She flees with the black sheep of the family, tells him everything, he says he helps her if he gets his share.

Then, we still have over AN HOUR TO GO. That hour is filled with a blackmailing letter over some medical record, the actual archive or whatever gets burned down completely. She and black sheep drive off, which leads us to one of the most ineptly shot car chase scenes in all of movie history, black sheep gets carted away, detective sits himself in MCs car. Which is inconvenient because the blackmailer wants to meet up with her at 10 am and Oh No, it's 9:56! What do we do?!

We ask detective if we can quickly get out and pick something up. MC then goes into a hair dressers shop, for some reason knows and it let through the back door without any questions and gets to the meeting point. And no, you are not missing any relevant information that would have this make more sense. It is literally just a bunch of inadequately strung together set pieces.

So now we are at the Black Mail Basement™, where we find a character dying. That character has been in like two scenes before. She isn't even questioned at the start where everyone makes their testimony.

Nothing of much relevance happens from then on for a good half hour or so until the confrontation at the end between black sheep, Daniel "have I got a wooden expression for you" Craig and MC. In this confrontation, we learn about the absolutely convoluted way of backbending the death scenario. Black sheep knows where MC keeps the medication for patriarch. He goes through them, switches the medication and the morphene and takes the morphene antidote. Since MC accidentally switched the two bottles at the start, she technically actually didn't even kill the patriarch. Because the liquids are slightly differently viscous and she could feel that. Nevermind the fact that the shots of her getting them out the bag show her holding both of them in one hand, but whatever.

We can then end with MC telling a deliberate lie which black sheep refutes or something, MC vomits him in the face, the cops now have his confession on tape and the MC standing at the front porch, the rest of patriarchs family outside. MC drinks from a cup saying My House, My Rules, My Coffee. Again in an incredibly inept try to spin some comedy into this.