Nozz

If it weren't such a well liked movie, I wouldn't have watched much of this because the first act is marred by stilted dialogue and by a hard-to-swallow performance on the part of the usually excellent Daniel Craig. As a vain but apparently infallible supersleuth with a genteel vocabulary, Craig imperfectly affects a southern US accent and doesn't seem quite to have a handle on his character. I began to look wistfully at Don Johnson, who appears in a supporting role. He could have played Craig's part more believably with half the effort.

The supersleuth enlists a helper whom, at one point, he jocularly calls Watson. But the thing about Conan Doyle's Watson is that, usually, he's a perfect avatar for the reader. The reader knows only as much as Watson knows and finds it out only when Watson finds it out. "Knives Out" doesn't heed that convention. It shows us flashbacks as convenient, generally from an omniscient point of view that gives the unfolding of the story rather an artificial quality. It is a story that's both intricate and reasonably easy to follow, though.

Facing Tel Aviv's inflated housing prices and having little to invest, a couple settles for a tiny house in need of fixing up. A sharpster-- one of many in the seedy neighborhood-- advises them that rather than living in the place, they could do better by subdividing it and renting it out. This seems to set up the adventure that will carry us through the movie with the couple as protagonists, but they turn out to be merely secondary figures. That's the first of a number of clever strokes of scriptwriting here. Unfortunately, the movie is marred by cheap overemphasis on many of the gags. Mugging, musical effects, and sound effects degrade the humor distractingly. There are also a couple of scenes that step into fantasy or surrealism, and I think they were a questionable idea because the whole movie is on the edge of fantasy anyway. Underneath all the schtick is some telling social satire, but in order to appreciate it you have to forgive a kind of nonsense reminiscent of the notorious Israeli "burekas" school of comedy.