The movie begins in 1953 with the 100th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, together with a party afterwards to celebrate the occasion. Leo Kopernick, the director of the upcoming film adaptation, gets into a public fight with the lead actor of the play, and when Kopernick goes to a dressing room afterwards to clean himself up, he’s attacked and killed by a mysterious figure. The crime is investigated by Inspector George Stoppard of Scotland Yard, who is joined by Constable Stalker, an eager young woman preparing for her sergeant’s exam. As it turns out, Kopernick wasn’t particularly loved, and everyone involved with The Mousetrap had one reason or other to kill him.
The plot is tied heavily to The Mousetrap play and (theoretical) movie adaptation, and has many meta moments where an element of The Mousetrap or murder mysteries is discussed by the characters and then actually enacted in the film. These moments are cute, but also the curse that plagues the movie and drags it down. For you see, the movie opens with a monologue by Kopernick about how murder mysteries are all the same, and if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.
It seems ridiculous to me that you’d create and produce an original murder mystery if you aren’t a fan of the genre, and yet here we are. See How They Run is the exact kind of boring mystery Kopernick complains about. It feels like something that would be created by someone who thinks that a game of Clue is a valid murder mystery (which is particularly ironic given that the Clue movie is so fun).
Stoppard and Stalker interview each of the suspects in turn. Immediately after talking to each suspect Stalker immediately becoming convinced that they’re the killer, and Stoppard chastises her not to jump to conclusions. Another murder happens, but nobody really cares about it. Stoppard and Stalker then finally stumble upon the smoking gun in time for the culprit to get bored and confess to everything on their own. There’s a dramatic showdown, everything resolves itself, the end.
There’s a corpse, a cast of characters, and… that’s about it. There’s no trick, there’s no impossible (or even mysterious) element of the crime, there’s no alibis. There are plenty of motives, but that’s about it, and the true motive is essentially pulled out of thin air. Actually, the culprit as a whole is pulled out of nowhere, as there are literally zero clues towards their identity. But don’t interpret that as meaning that the culprit was surprising, because they weren’t. SHTR (I’ll let you make the joke) is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. It considers itself witty and meta, and does exactly what a movie that considers itself witty and meta would do.
The most intricate part of the plot is unfortunately nothing more than a massive contrivance that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It isn’t even part of the crime itself, and is simply one tense moment in the investigation that is resolved in an anticlimax. (Specifically, vg sryg vaperqvoyl pbagevirq gung Xbcreavpx unq n xvq jvgu n jbzna jvgu gur fnzr culfvpny srngherf naq svefg anzr nf Fgbccneq’f rk-jvsr. Naq rira vs jr npprcg gung, vg’f evqvphybhf gung Fgnyxre naq gur pbzzvffvbare pnyyrq ure va jvgubhg irevslvat gung fur jnf npghnyyl Fgbccneq’f rk-jvsr.)
I know this review has been negative, but SHTR isn’t really bad, it’s just… mediocre. Thoroughly, thoroughly mediocre, on every metric. Characters are distinct but forgettable. The jokes got smirks but no laughs. The visuals are crisp but there was no major set piece. The plot technically functions but does nothing novel or interesting.
If nothing else, SHTR made me appreciate the Knives Out movies a lot more. While those movies might not hold a candle to the top mystery novels, they still have punchier humor, more distinctive moments and set pieces, more memorable casts, and at least attempt to have tricks and subterfuge in the mystery plot.
The most unique thing SHTR does is probably a periodic use of split-screen shots, which is kind of cool in the climax but otherwise doesn’t feel like it adds much. But even then I thought the cinematography of Wake Up Dead Man was overall much better, with intentional use of light and shadow to highlight the religious dichotomy explored in that film.
As I’ve already gone on and on about, SHTR does essentially nothing with its plot, which puts the Knives Out movies ahead from the gate. But I think the real dividing factor is each movie’s (mis)use of its cast. A lot of the momentum of the Knives Out movies come from the interplay of the cast. We see the group and how they function, and there are often multiple scenes featuring the full cast throughout the movie. On top of that, Blanc always has an assistant connected to the crime somehow, so even when Blanc interviews the suspects character development can be driven by their interactions with the assistant.
SHTR doesn’t do anything like that. We only really see the cast interact as a unit in the climax, when the movie is ending. Before that, there are only two scenes where the full cast is present: the intro, where we mainly see how each character interacts with Kopernick but not with each other, and Stoppard’s arrival after the discovery of the body, which (like the rest of the movie) focuses on the cast’s interactions with Stoppard rather than with each other. The rest of the movie is just Stoppard and Stalker either on their own—although they do admittedly have a nice dynamic, with Stalker doing a great job of providing an emotional core for the audience to view the movie through—or with a suspect. And while this is enough to establish the characters and plot, it isn’t nearly entertaining or engaging as when a Knives Out locks all of its characters in a room together and lets us view the dysfunction first-hand.
(As an aside, a fair number of characters are real people, which perhaps constrained the writing a bit. I’ll admit that other than Christie herself I didn’t know who was real until looking at the Wikipedia page, but apparently the movie made her husband black. It really doesn’t matter since he has such a small role (and I didn’t even realize that that character was Christie’s husband until I saw the Wikipedia page), but a small one-off change like that seems a bit odd to me.)
Since I feel bad ending this review without saying anything positive, I liked how SHTR was able to wrap tie its plot so strongly to The Mousetrap without providing any actual spoilers for the play.
But that’s about it. See How They Run is worse than bad; it’s boring. There’s nothing to solve, no puzzle to toy with, no question to ponder over. Like a game of Clue, the cast is established, and an hour later one of them is arbitrarily designated the murderer, and that’s that, with a plot so milquetoast there isn’t even anything to laugh at or riff on. If you ever want to watch this, go pick out some other piece of mystery media instead, because even if it isn’t better than See How They Run will at least be more interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment